  Mobility-On-Demand (MoD) services have been transforming the urban mobility
ecosystem. However, they raise a lot of concerns for their impact on
congestion, Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT), and competition with transit. There
are also questions about their long-term survival because of inherent
inefficiencies in their operations. Considering the popularity of the MoD
services, increasing ride-pooling is an important means to address these
concerns. Shareability depends not only on riders attitudes and preferences but
also on operating models deployed by providers. The paper introduces an advance
requests operating model for ride pooling where users may request rides at
least H minutes in advance of their desired departure times. A platform with
efficient algorithms for request matching, vehicle routing, rebalancing, and
flexible user preferences is developed. A large-scale transportation network
company dataset is used to evaluate the performance of the advance requests
system relative to current practices. The impacts of various design aspects of
the system (advance requests horizon, vehicle capacity) on its performance are
investigated. The sensitivity of the results to user preferences in terms of
the level of service (time to be served and excess trip time), willingness to
share and place requests in advance, and traffic conditions are explored. The
results suggest that significant benefits in terms of sustainability, level of
service, and fleet utilization can be realized when advance requests are along
with an increased willingness to share. Furthermore, even near-on-demand
(relative short advance planning horizons) operations can offer many benefits
for all stakeholders involved (passengers, operators, and cities).
