In Japan, ” carpooling service” of cabs was legally recognized in November 2021, making it possible to operate carpooling cabs. In the future, there are hopes for the institutionalization of ride-sharing cabs, which can be operated more flexibly (i.e., can respond to new requests after the consent of each passenger and reservations have been made). One of the advantages of the practical application of ride-sharing cabs is the effective use of seats, which will reduce the number of situations in which passengers want to travel by cab but are not easily matched on the cab dispatch application, such as during peak demand periods or bad weather, when there is excessive demand for cabs. In order to increase this benefit, the organizers invited groups of people to think imaginatively about how to design a method of operation in which individual cabs would transport groups of passengers in what order.
The workshop flow consisted of the organizer explaining the background of ride-sharing cabs and their operation methods, and then showing a video simulation of what was to be discussed at the workshop. As group work, participants discussed and proposed operational methods to reduce the number of unavailable passengers under the conditions and simulation environment provided by the organizer. The participants filled in the operation method sheet with their proposals and the reasons why they thought the proposed operation method could reduce the number of unavailable passengers, and submitted the sheet to the organizer. The organizer will then put the proposed operation method into a programming code, add the simulation results to the sheet, and return the sheet to the participants for feedback. The simulation results are then used in the next discussion. The plan is to improve the operational method by repeating the PDCA cycle described above. Finally, each group presented what they had discussed, their proposed operations, and their discussion of the simulation results.
The two groups submitted a total of 11 operational method sheets, and I was able to return seven sheets with simulation results, excluding those with insufficiently defined operational methods and those for which I was unable to run the simulation in time. Some of the operational methods and ideas that appeared in the proposals and discussions were: “Daring to reduce the passenger capacity may reduce the loss due to boarding and alighting time,” “Stricter restriction on the maximum waiting time when there are two or more requests to be carried by a vehicle,” “Classify requests by distance between origin and destination and give priority to requests of the same classification for ride-sharing,” “Give special consideration to the first boarding point in the case of a four-person ride-sharing and send an empty car to that point,” and others that I have never thought of before.