Seminar title: 

Several Queueing Models in On-Demand Economy

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Abstract: 

This presentation will discuss several queueing models motivated by the recent applications in the on-demand economy, such as ride-hailing, ride-sharing, and on-demand food delivery. In those settings, queueing models are built to capture spatial movements of servers such as vehicles and food-delivery couriers and temporal waiting by riders for cars or others who are willing to share a ride. These models are used to explain how to alleviate the “wild goose chase” problem in ride-hailing, how to dispatch and route food-delivery couriers when eaters can balk, and how to incentivize individual riders to choose the socially optimal ride-sharing options.

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Speaker bio: 

Ming Hu is the University of Toronto Distinguished Professor of Business Operations and Analytics and a professor of operations management at the Rotman School. His recent research has focused on operations management in the context of the sharing economy, social buying, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and two-sided markets, to make full use of operational decisions to benefit society. For further details, please visit http://ming.hu.