Smart Transportation Behavior through the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Ride-Hailing System in Iran

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, significant changes occurred in customer behavior, especially in traffic and urban transmission systems. In this context, there is a need for more scientific research and managerial approaches to develop behavior-based smart transportation solutions to deal with recent changes in customers, drivers, and traffic behaviors, including the volume of traffic and traffic routes. This research has tried to find a comprehensive view of novel travel behavior in different routes using a new social network analysis method. Our research is rooted in graph theory/network analysis and application of centrality concepts in social network analysis, particularly in the ride-hailing transportation systems under monumental competition. In this study, a big city, with near to ten million habitants (Tehran), is considered. All city areas were studied and clustered based on the primary measures of centrality, including degree centrality, Katz centrality, special vector centrality, page rank centrality, proximity centrality, and intermediate centrality. Our data were the trips of this system in Tehran, where the nodes in this network represent Tehran’s districts, and the connection between the two districts indicates the trips made between those two districts. Also, each link’s weight is the number of trips between the two nodes (district). The districts of Tehran were ranked in the smart transportation network based on six criteria: degree centrality, degree centrality of input, degree centrality of output, special vector centrality, hub, and reference points. Finally, according to comprehensive data-driven analysis, the studied company was suggested to create shared value and sustainability through the platform to perform a legitimate system to meet the new challenges. Our proposed system can help managers and governments to develop a behavior-based smart transportation system for big cities.