Scalability of Dial-a-Ride Systems—A Case Study to Assess Utilities of Ubiquitous Mass User Support

摘要

Evaluation of scalability and usability of dial-a-ride systems is reported as a case study to assess utilities of ubiquitous mass user support. One of applications of ubiquitous and multi-agent systems is transportation system in urban area. While multi-agent and ubiquitous systems are considered to support next-generation social systems, it is not clear how it provides advantage in usability and benefit. We will show a result of comparison between dial-a-ride bus systems, one of possible multi-agent application of transportation systems, and traditional fixed-route bus systems. We conduct experiments of various situation and show how the advantage of dial-a-ride is robust to the variation of social conditions. For example, when many demands occur from/to a certain point like railway stations or shopping centers, improvement of usability of dial-a-ride systems is better than one of fixed-route systems so that a break-even point between the two systems is reduced. This means that dial-a-ride systems are useful even in 'rush-hour'. Through these experiments, we will figure out the conditions where multi-agent like systems have advantage against traditional systems.