<i>mT-Share</i>: A Mobility-Aware Dynamic Taxi Ridesharing System
Zhidan Liu, Zengyang Gong, Jiangzhou Li, Kaishun Wu
Abstract
Due to the wide availability of taxis in a city and the tremendous benefits of ridesharing, taxi ridesharing becomes promising and attractive in recent years. Existing taxi ridesharing schemes simply match ride requests and taxis based on partial trip information and omit the offline passengers, who will hail a taxi at the roadside without submitting the ride requests to the system. Thus, they are still not efficient and practical. In this article, we consider the mobility-aware taxi ridesharing problem and present <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mT-Share</i> to address these limitations. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mT-Share</i> fully exploits the mobility information of taxis and ride requests to achieve efficient indexing of taxis/requests and better passenger–taxi matching, while still satisfying the constraints on passengers’ deadlines and taxis’ capacities. Specifically, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mT-Share</i> makes use of both geographical information and travel directions to index taxis and ride requests and supports the shortest path-based routing and probabilistic routing to serve both online and offline ride requests. In addition, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mT-Share</i> proposes a novel payment model to share the ridesharing benefits among the taxi driver and passengers. Extensive evaluations using a large real-world taxi data set demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mT-Share</i> , which can respond each ride request in milliseconds and be with moderate detour costs and passengers’ waiting time. Compared to state-of-the-art schemes, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mT-Share</i> can serve 42% and 62% more ride requests in peak and nonpeak hours, respectively. Furthermore, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">mT-Share</i> can save 8.6% taxi fare for passengers and meanwhile increase 7.8% incomes for taxi drivers, when compared with the regular taxi services.