Generalized multipath planning model for ride-sharing systems

摘要

Ride-sharing systems should combine environmental protection (through a reduction of fossil fuel usage), socialization, and security. Encouraging people to use ride-sharing systems by satisfying their demands for safety, privacy and convenience is challenging. Most previous works on this topic have focused on finding a fixed path between the driver and the riders either based solely on their locations or using social information. The drivers’ and riders’ lack of options to change or compute the path according to their own preferences and requirements is problematic. With the advancement of mobile social networking technologies, it is necessary to reconsider the principles and desired characteristics of ride-sharing systems. In this paper, we formalized the ride-sharing problem as a multi source-destination path planning problem. An objective function that models different objectives in a unified framework was developed. Moreover, we provide a similarity model, which can reflect the personal preferences of the rides and utilize social media to obtain the current interests of the riders and drivers. The model also allows each driver to generate sub-optimal paths according to his own requirements by suitably adjusting the weights. Two case studies have shown that our system has the potential to find the best possible match and computes the multiple optimal paths against different user-defined objective functions.