Integrated passenger-freight transport of ridesharing with the first-last mile consideration

This paper presents a stochastic user equilibrium (SUE) ridesharing assignment model for passenger-freight transport integration, considering the First Mile (FM) and Last Mile (LM) scenarios. Unlike existing models focusing solely on travellers’ demand, this study introduces freight customers as a new demand category, with deliveries handled either by ridesharing vehicles or express services. The proposed model is formulated as a path-based mixed complementarity problem (MCP) formulation. Based on numerical examples, a paradoxical phenomenon regarding the total system cost of freight due to the stochastic nature of the problem is discussed. Sensitivity analysis of various model parameters is also conducted, which show that in addition to the platform commission rate, the freight-customer-to-traveller demand ratio, heterogeneous vehicle capacity and freight size and FM/LM passenger demand also have crucial effects on platform management strategies. Additionally, an example using the Eastern-Massachusetts network demonstrates the applicability of the proposed model to real-world networks.