The Merits of Sharing a Ride

The culture of sharing instead of ownership is sharply increasing in individuals behaviors. Particularly in transportation, concepts of sharing a ride in either carpooling or ridesharing have been recently adopted. An efficient optimization approach to match passengers in real-time is the core of any ridesharing system. In this paper, we model ridesharing as an online matching problem on general graphs such that passengers do not drive private cars and use shared taxis. We propose an optimization algorithm to solve it. The outlined algorithm calculates the optimal waiting time when a passenger arrives. This leads to a matching with minimal overall overheads while maximizing the number of partnerships. To evaluate the behavior of our algorithm, we used NYC taxi real-life data set. Results represent a substantial reduction in overall overheads

Research on Strategy Control of Taxi Carpooling Detour Route under Uncertain Environment

For the problem of route choice in taxi carpooling detour, considering the uncertainty of traffic and the characteristic of passengers’ noncomplete rationality, an evolutionary game model of taxi carpooling detour route is built, in which prospect theory is introduced and revenue of strategy is replaced by prospect value. The model reflects more really decision-making psychology of passengers. Then the stable strategies of the model are studied, and the influences of detour distance and traffic congestion on detour carpooling success are analyzed, respectively. The results show that when at least one route of which prospect values for two passenger sides are both positive exists, carpooling route can reach an agreement. The route is stable strategy of evolutionary game, and the passengers requiring short travel time tend to select the nondetour route. With the increase of detour distance and traffic congestion rate, the possibility of reaching an agreement decreases gradually; that is, possibility of carpooling failure increases. So taxi carpooling detour is possible under the certain condition, but some measures must be carried out such as constraints of detour distance and mitigation of traffic congestion to improve carpooling success probability. These conclusions have a certain guiding significance to the formulation of taxi carpooling policy

Planning of Truck Platoons: a Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

A truck platoon is a set of virtually linked trucks that drive closely behind one another using automated driving technology. Benefits of truck platooning include cost savings, reduced emissions, and more efficient utilization of road capacity. To fully reap these benefits in the initial phases requires careful planning of platoons based on trucks’ itineraries and time schedules. This paper provides a framework to classify various new transportation planning problems that arise in truck platooning, surveys relevant operations research models for these problems in the literature and identifies directions for future research

An Optimal Ride Sharing Recommendation Framework for Carpooling Services

Carpooling services allow drivers to share rides with other passengers. This helps in reducing the passengers’ fares and time, as well as traffic congestion and increases the income for drivers. In recent years, several carpooling based recommendation systems have been proposed. However, most of the existing systems do no effectively balance the conflicting objectives of drivers and passengers. We propose a Highest Aggregated Score Vehicular Recommendation (HASVR) framework that recommends a vehicle with highest aggregated score to the requesting passenger. The aggregated score is based on parameters, namely: (a) average time delay, (b) vehicle’s capacity, (c) fare reduction, (d) driving distance, and (e) profit increment. We propose a heuristic that balances the incentives of both drivers and passengers keeping in consideration their constraints and the real-time traffic conditions. We evaluated HASVR with a real-world dataset that contains GPS trace data of 61,136 taxicabs. Evaluation results confirm the effectiveness of HASVR compared to existing scheme in reducing the total mileage used to deliver all passengers, reducing the passengers’ fare, increasing the profit of drivers, and increasing the percentage of satisfied ride requests

GIS-based identification and assessment of suitable meeting point locations for ride-sharing

Ride-Sharing or carpooling is a common means to utilize available but so far unused vehicle seat capacity. To establish a shared ride, it is necessary that the driver and the passengers agree on a meeting point. In most existing applications, the pickup location of a passenger is assumed to be on his or her doorstep. However, many people are willing to walk a certain distance to meet at a place where a safe and convenient boarding can be established, while at the same time the necessary detour of the driver can be kept acceptable. In this contribution we introduce an assessment scheme for meeting point locations based on results of an online survey retrieving the stated acceptance of meeting point locations and the relevance of the available facilities like parking places, seating, shelter and light. To this end, the infrastructure of a medium-sized European city is assumed to show exemplary how the amount and the distribution of suitable meeting point locations affects the performance and convenience of ride-sharing.DFG/GRK/193