Space-time clustering-based method to optimize shareability in real-time ride-sharing

PLoS One. 2022 Jan 14;17(1):e0262499. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262499. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Real-time ride-sharing has become popular in recent years. However, the underlying optimization problem for this service is highly complex. One of the most critical challenges when solving the problem is solution quality and computation time, especially in large-scale problems where the number of received requests is huge. In this paper, we rely on an exact solving method to ensure the quality of the solution, while using AI-based techniques to limit the number of requests that we feed to the solver. More precisely, we propose a clustering method based on a new shareability function to put the most shareable trips inside separate clusters. Previous studies only consider Spatio-temporal dependencies to do clustering on the mobility service requests, which is not efficient in finding the shareable trips. Here, we define the shareability function to consider all the different sharing states for each pair of trips. Each cluster is then managed with a proposed heuristic framework in order to solve the matching problem inside each cluster. As the method favors sharing, we present the number of sharing constraints to allow the service to choose the number of shared trips. To validate our proposal, we employ the proposed method on the network of Lyon city in France, with half-million requests in the morning peak from 6 to 10 AM. The results demonstrate that the algorithm can provide high-quality solutions in a short time for large-scale problems. The proposed clustering method can also be used for different mobility service problems such as car-sharing, bike-sharing, etc.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Automobiles / statistics & numerical data
  • Cities
  • Cluster Analysis
  • France
  • Information Dissemination / methods*
  • Models, Theoretical
  • Private Sector / statistics & numerical data
  • Private Sector / trends*
  • Space-Time Clustering
  • Transportation / methods*
  • Transportation / statistics & numerical data

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. (Grant agreement No 646592 – MAGnUM project).