Mobility-Aware Dynamic Taxi Ridesharing

Abstract

Taxi ridesharing becomes promising and attractive because of the wide availability of taxis in a city and tremendous benefits of ridesharing, e.g., alleviating traffic congestion and reducing energy consumption. Existing taxi ridesharing schemes, however, are not efficient and practical, due to they simply match ride requests and taxis based on partial trip information and omit the offline passengers, who hail a taxi at roadside with no explicit requests to the system. In this paper, we consider the mobility-aware taxi ridesharing problem, and present mT- Share to address these limitations. mT-Share fully exploits the mobility information of ride requests and taxis to achieve efficient indexing of taxis/requests and better passenger-taxi matching, while still satisfying the constraints on passengers’ deadlines and taxis’ capacities. Specifically, mT-Share indexes taxis and ride requests with both geographical information and travel directions, and supports the shortest path based routing and probabilistic routing to serve both online and offline ride requests. Extensive experiments with a large real-world taxi dataset demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of mT-Share, which can response each ride request in milliseconds and with a moderate detour cost. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, mT-Share serves 42% and 62% more ride requests in peak and non-peak hours, respectively.