Flexi-Sharing: A Flexible and Personalized Taxi-Sharing System

摘要

Taxi sharing is a promising approach to reducing energy consumptions, utilizing limited taxi resources efficiently while preserving the interest of individuals. The existing studies mostly fail to locate a pick-up/drop-off point for each individual passenger in scheduling the sharing route. Besides, they can hardly provide personalized services. To this end, we propose a new taxi-sharing system called Flexi-Sharing to provide flexible and personalized taxi sharing services. It considers the nearby alternative pick-up/drop-off locations and schedules a flexible sharing route with the maximum reduced travel distance by letting passengers walk a short distance. For a sharing request, Flexi-Sharing generates the sharing schedule consisting of a set of companions, the shortest sharing route and the best pick-up/drop-off locations by maximizing the satisfaction of involved passengers. Extensive experiments are conducted using a one-month taxi trajectory data collected in Chengdu, China. Experimental results show that Flexi-Sharing achieves 60 sharing rate and reduces 28000km travel distances per hour in the city, which are 15 higher and 16 longer than those of the method that delivers passengers at exact requested locations, respectively. Flexi-Sharing also promises a satisfactory system response time and provides superior sharing experiences.