How Many Passengers Can We Serve with Ride-sharing?

TL;DR

This paper introduces algorithms to optimize ride-sharing by grouping multiple requests, aiming to maximize served passengers and improve transportation efficiency.

Contribution

It presents a novel graph-based approximation algorithm and an exact algorithm for ride-sharing request grouping to maximize passenger service.

Findings

The algorithms effectively increase passenger service capacity.

The exact algorithm operates with exponential time complexity.

The approximation algorithm provides near-optimal solutions efficiently.

Abstract

Ride-sharing can reduce traffic congestion and thus reduce gas emissions and save travel time. However, transportation system with ride-sharing is currently inefficient due to low occupancy rate, high travel demand and some other factors. Existing literature did not consider ride-sharing with multi-request grouped in one trip. In our paper, we firstly proposed a graph-based algorithm that can obtain an approximation solution in polynomial time and then proposed an exact algorithm to solve this problem with maximizing the number of passenegers served in $O(1.2312^{|\mathcal{E}|})$ time.