An Online Ride-Sharing Path Planning Strategy for Public Vehicle Systems

As efficient traffic-management platforms, public vehicle (PV) systems are envisioned to be a promising approach to solving traffic congestions and pollutions for future smart cities. PV systems provide online/dynamic peer-to-peer ride-sharing services with the goal of serving sufficient number of customers with minimum number of vehicles and lowest possible cost. A key component of the PV system is the online ride-sharing scheduling strategy. In this paper, we propose an efficient path planning strategy that focuses on a limited potential search area for each vehicle by filtering out the requests that violate passenger service quality level, so that the global search is reduced to local search. We analyze the performance of the proposed solution such as reduction ratio of computational complexity. Simulations based on the Manhattan taxi data set show that, the computing time is reduced by 22% compared with the exhaustive search method under the same service quality performance.Comment: 12 page

Joint Transportation and Charging Scheduling in Public Vehicle Systems - A Game Theoretic Approach

Public vehicle (PV) systems are promising transportation systems for future smart cities which provide dynamic ride-sharing services according to passengers' requests. PVs are driverless/self-driving electric vehicles which require frequent recharging from smart grids. For such systems, the challenge lies in both the efficient scheduling scheme to satisfy transportation demands with service guarantee and the cost-effective charging strategy under the real-time electricity pricing. In this paper, we study the joint transportation and charging scheduling for PV systems to balance the transportation and charging demands, ensuring the long-term operation. We adopt a cake cutting game model to capture the interactions among PV groups, the cloud and smart grids. The cloud announces strategies to coordinate the allocation of transportation and energy resources among PV groups. All the PV groups try to maximize their joint transportation and charging utilities. We propose an algorithm to obtain the unique normalized Nash equilibrium point for this problem. Simulations are performed to confirm the effects of our scheme under the real taxi and power grid data sets of New York City. Our results show that our scheme achieves almost the same transportation performance compared with a heuristic scheme, namely, transportation with greedy charging; however, the average energy price of the proposed scheme is 10.86% lower than the latter one.Comment: 13 page