Fast Detour Computation for Ride Sharing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast algorithm for ride sharing that efficiently finds offers with minimal detours, significantly improving matching rates and response times for small-town trips compared to existing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel algorithm that computes minimal-detour ride sharing offers quickly, enabling practical web service implementation for small-town trips.

Findings

Lookup times around 5ms for realistic databases

Matching rate of 90% for small-town trips

Outperforms simple matching algorithms by 20% in success rate

Abstract

Todays ride sharing services still mimic a better billboard. They list the offers and allow to search for the source and target city, sometimes enriched with radial search. So finding a connection between big cities is quite easy. These places are on a list of designated origin and distination points. But when you want to go from a small town to another small town, even when they are next to a freeway, you run into problems. You can't find offers that would or could pass by the town easily with little or no detour. We solve this interesting problem by presenting a fast algorithm that computes the offers with the smallest detours w.r.t. a request. Our experiments show that the problem is efficiently solvable in times suitable for a web service implementation. For realistic database size we achieve lookup times of about 5ms and a matching rate of 90% instead of just 70% for the simple matching algorithms used today.