Technological advancements have enabled new flexible and demand-responsive transportation services, whose significance on both urban and rural transportation systems have been increased rapidly due to the successful transport network companies such as Uber and Lyft and due to innovative public transportation operators developing automated demand-responsive services with public-private-partnerships. At the same time, there has been also increasing interest in these services in several academic disciplines like operations research, transportation economics and computer science. Recently, research has focused on modelling these services and related pricing policies, and on developing algorithms for optimal vehicle routing and demand management.

During the fellowship period, the objective is to achieve deeper understanding on the economics of the intelligent transportation services by extending the economic models of the automated demand responsive transportation and by adopting recently developed simulation models of the Max-Planck Institute, which utilize trip origin-destination data collected in Germany, South Africa and elsewhere.