Dynamic Ride-Sharing - A Next Innovative Approach

Taxi is the most popular type of on-demand transportation service system in urban areas because taxi sharing system offer more and better services in terms of short waiting times and travel convenience. However, a shortage of taxicabs has always been rare in many urban contexts especially during rush hours and taxi has great rate to maximize its efficiency by employing shared-ride concepts. There are recent successes in real-time ridesharing projects that are expected to bring substantial benefit on energy consumption and operation efficiency, and thus it is important to develop advanced vehicle dispatch algorithms to maximize occupancies and minimize travel times in real-time. This paper investigates how taxicab services can be improved by proposing shared-taxi algorithms and what type of objective functions and parameters could be employed to prevent excessive passenger tours.