Bestmile, a mobility services platform for autonomous and human-driven vehicle fleets, unveiled its new consultancy to help fleets deploy new mobility services.

The Professional Consulting Service is based on its Mobility Services Platform and advanced simulation capabilities. Called the Service Design Offering, the consulting service enables mobility providers to accurately plan and analyze service performance in advance, accelerating time to market and reducing risks associated with deploying new mobility services.

Mobility service providers considering unprecedented new on-demand services face questions that they can’t answer without testing the actual service. Common questions include: how many vehicles will they need, where should they be deployed, and how will the fleet perform in specific areas with unique demand profiles? For many new shared, on-demand services, there is little available in the way of a recipe for success.

The company’s Mobility Services Platform uses advanced scheduling, dispatching, and ride-matching algorithms that make it possible to optimize key performance indicators (KPIs) such as waiting times, demand-fulfillment, vehicle/asset-utilization, and more to find the right balance between the number of vehicles needed, demand characteristics, and service area requirements.

Bestmile’s Service Design Offering uses the same platform that is used for commercial deployments to simulate planned services using actual or expected demand data for a specific service area. This allows mobility service providers to test multiple variables like fleet size, vehicle positioning, vehicle capacity, and waiting and ride time limits, with the goal of optimizing KPIs such as vehicle utilization, excess ride times, and pickup time deviations, all prior to launch.

To demonstrate the capabilities of the consulting service, Bestmile utilized demand data from Chicago taxi companies and tested the performance of three services in three different areas: microtransit in Lincoln Park, shuttle service to and from O’Hare Airport, and citywide ride-sharing. Each test used multiple fleet sizes and sharing scenarios to view impacts on ride acceptance rates, ride times and waiting times, and other passenger and operator KPIs.

The new offering is available now to all existing and prospective customers.