Real-Time Distributed Taxi Ride Sharing

Kanika Bathla, Vaskar Raychoudhury, DIvya Saxena, Ajay D. Kshemkalyani

Research output: Chapter in book / Conference proceedingConference article published in proceeding or bookAcademic researchpeer-review

18 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Taxicabs play an important role in urban public transportation. Analyzing taxi traffic of Shanghai, San Francisco, and New York City, we have found that the short trips within city are mostly of commuters during office hours and span a specific city area. Now, if the large number of commuters are ready to share their rides, that will have a huge impact on the 'super-commute' problem faced in various cities of USA and around the world. While ride-sharing can increase taxi occupancy and profit for drivers and savings for passengers, it reduces the overall on-road traffic and thereby the average commute time and carbon foot-print. While centralized ride-sharing services, like car-pooling, can address the problem to some extent, they lack scalability and power to dynamically adapt the taxi schedule for best results. In this paper, we propose a four-way model for the ride-sharing problem and develop a novel distributed taxi ride sharing (TRS) algorithm to address dynamic scheduling of ride sharing requests. Our algorithm shows the overall reduction in total distance travelled by taxis as a result of ride sharing. Empirical results using large scale taxi GPS traces from Shanghai, China show that TRS algorithm can grossly outperform a Taxi Distance Minimization (TDM) algorithm. TRS accommodates 33% higher ride share among passengers while dealing with 44,241 requests handled by 4,000 taxis on a single day in Shanghai.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2018 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference, ITSC 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages2044-2051
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781728103235
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Dec 2018
Event21st IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, ITSC 2018 - Maui, United States
Duration: 4 Nov 20187 Nov 2018

Publication series

NameIEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Proceedings, ITSC
Volume2018-November

Conference

Conference21st IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, ITSC 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityMaui
Period4/11/187/11/18

Keywords

  • Data Analysis
  • Distributed Coordination
  • GPS traces
  • Smart Transportation
  • Taxi ride sharing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Automotive Engineering
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Computer Science Applications

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Real-Time Distributed Taxi Ride Sharing'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this