Mass Customizing Paratransit Services With a Ridesharing Option

Paratransit services for people with travel difficulties have received increasing government and community attention due to the aging population. In this paper, we examine an integrated service design approach to customize paratransit services with a ridesharing option for a dial-a-ride (DAR) service. The fundamental challenge of DAR services is a lack of commonality across other services in the process, which results in low vehicle utilization. To mass customize paratransit services systematically, we identify the common service components of different paratransit services under the design framework of product family architecture. We then formulate the community organization's pricing and vehicle scheduling decisions with a ridesharing option for a DAR operation as a two-stage decision model. In stage one of the tactical plan, we determine user tolerance of earlier pick-up and later drop-off times, and a price discount for a shared ride. Based on the user tolerance of a longer traveling time, we optimize the vehicle scheduling of shared service orders. Our experimental results indicate that a ridesharing policy option for a DAR service providing a 20% discount for passengers who accept a 15-min earlier pick-up time or a later drop-off time leads to 15% more people being served.