Research on the Construction of Minimalist Model for Urban Ride-Hailing

In recent years, many scholars have advocated the development of public transportation in China’s cities in response to increasing traffic congestion and environmental pollution. However, the fixed departure time, peak hour congestion, and “last mile” problems have forced city managers to focus on the development of the taxi industry at the same time, and with the improvement of Internet technology, ride-hailing have become mainstream. At the city scale, a study based on ride-hailing mode can take full advantage of big data technology to reduce uncertainty and provide suggestions for controlling fleet size and improving system efficiency. Based on Occam’s razor theorem, this paper gives a research framework for a minimalist model, including the construction of urban road networks, the generation of passengers, the matching between passengers and vehicles, and the movement of vehicles. By carrying out a simple analysis, the results prove that the model constructed in this paper can reflect the universal characteristics of the system although it ignores many details, which can provide a reference for studying many problems in the ride-hailing system in reality.