A joint day-to-day mode and within day day departure time choice model for the analysis of dynamic ridesharing

Sharing travels is an effective way to increase car occupancy rates and to reduce the total number of cars for the same distances travelled. A potentially attractive service based on the sharing concept is dynamic ridesharing (DRS), where a service provider matches up driver and passenger with similar itineraries and time schedules with an automated program. To analyse how modal shift from single passenger use of the car to high occupancy one can be realized and what are the demand management solutions that can effectively be recommended, we deal with a theoretically interesting basic model structure of a single-link case, in which we study the complex interaction of multiple factors involved in the dynamic ridesharing problem, and the joint sensitivity to the most relevant parameters involved in this behavioural process. The main contribution of this study is therefore a unified framework that is able to model the dynamics of the departure time, characterized as a within-day process, while keeping the mode choice as a day-to-day process, and characterizing explicitly the matching process of DRS