About This Project
We propose a new transportation system, called Electric and Autonomous Shared Taxi system (EAST), that fully takes advantage of recent exciting techniques including electric vehicles (EVs), autonomous vehicles (AVs), and shared mobility. We will use New York City's taxi trip data and conduct the first study on feasibility of EAST in large cities by examining deployment of charging, parking, and pickup stations, opportunities for shared trips, and application developments.
Ask the Scientists
Join The DiscussionWhat is the context of this research?
This study aims to fully utilize the recent amazing techniques in transportation, including AVs, EVs, and mobility sharing and move urban mobility to a new sustainable world of driverless, electric, and sharing. Most academic and industrial efforts are focused on designing prototypes, improving each technique, and developing ambitious development strategies. However, there are few empirical attentions on feasibility and benefits of an urban transportation system combining three techniques. Hence, we will plan an electric and autonomous shared taxi system in New York City starting from current taxi demand and discuss its feasibility and benefits.
What is the significance of this project?
This project will provide various contributions in the future urban transportation system. Is the new transportation system feasible and beneficial? How will we deploy charging and parking locations, as well as pickup stations? How will we match rides? What does the client app look like and how will we distribute and communicate with vehicles? This project will be the first comprehensive study on these practical problems in a real city. Although few current transportation systems have employed EVs or UberPool (i.e. one of mobility sharing in taxi industry), this project will be the first step to combine aforementioned techniques together and may advance the practice of these techniques.
What are the goals of the project?
First, this project will collect one-year taxi and Uber trip data to have a better understanding of urban mobility by taxis in New York city. This is one of the most important parts of this project and provides a solid foundation in the feasibility analysis of EAST.
Second, we will start from the current taxi and Uber trips, qualitatively discuss feasibility of EAST, quantitatively explore various problems defined above, such as deployments of charging, parking, and pickup locations, vehicle distribution and fleet size, and benefits of EAST, and functionally develop the client apps and system communication.
In the end, we will share our data and findings and distribute them to related academics and industries.
Budget
The funds of this project will help us complete this project in two ways.
First, this fund will provide an opportunity for one-week field study in New York City and survey with all stakeholders. The fund will pay the round-trip ticket and accommodation at New York city. During this field study, we will foil taxi and Uber trip data directly from taxi and limousine commission. Meanwhile, we will visit the taxi hotspots at New York city, hold various talks with taxi agency, department of planning and environment, taxi drivers, and vehicle manufacturers, and commence an online survey on demand for EAST.
Second, the fund will cover the stipend of two assistant during data collection and analysis. The two assistant will help develop the online survey and Uber demand tool. In addition, they will help manage the cloud storage and upload latest data and findings.
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Meet the Team
Team Bio
The principal investigator on this project is Mr. Wenbo Zhang. His advising Professor is Dr. Satish V. Ukkusuri, the director of the Interdisciplinary Transportation Modeling and Analytics Lab at Purdue University, where most researchers have made extraordinary findings on data-driven transportation modelings and are leading related studies in U.S. We are very excited on this project and have been doing a series of similar data-driven problems, preparing us well for this project.
Wenbo Zhang
I am a Doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Transportation Modeling and Analytics Lab at Purdue University, where I work on Transportation Modeling and Data Analyses with Dr. Satish V. Ukkusuri. My recent works involve a series of data-driven problems, for instance, taxi movement modeling, taxi demand modeling, deployments of taxi group ride stands, dynamic ride-sharing, and taxi regulations on fleet size and pricing.
Before joining Purdue, I have completed my bachelor and master degree (directed by Dr. Jian John Lu) at China University of Mining & Technology and Southeast University, respectively.
Following my PhD study, I will continue my studies of data-driven transportation modelings and explore the future of sustainable urban transportation system.
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