Event Date
Guest Speakers: Johanna Amaya, Assistant Professor of Supply Chain & Information Systems, Penn State University, Smeal College of Business, Penn State University
Finding parking to make deliveries in urban areas is a challenge. Urban parking infrastructure is limited due to high premium land value and increasing demand for curb space. It is proposed that better space management of on-street loading zones may be achieved by designing policies that incorporate behavior patterns of last-mile delivery drivers. Utilization is modeled as a Markov Decision Process with the baseline being the current first-come first-serve policy with a 60-minute static parking session. The baseline results in only 27% utilization of awarded minutes on average. Flexible parking sessions are introduced to account for the demand distribution of drivers and achieve the same levels of mean utilization as 60-minute parking sessions as well as improve space management by utilizing 70% of the awarded minutes on average. Moreover, the proposed flexible scheme is tested with advanced reservations and found higher levels of mean utilization relative to the 60-minute parking session. The analysis goes beyond utilization and finds that flexible parking sessions may achieve competitive revenues by utilizing an increasing block pricing scheme and holding fees for advanced reservations. Furthermore, driver choice was incorporated to determine willingness of drivers to park at available loading zones. The results show that the proposed scheme can reduce illegal parking while increasing utilization, confirming that parking infrastructure may be better managed when policies match the behavior of drivers leading to improved system conditions and society welfare.
[Please note this seminar starts promptly at 1:40 PST]