Frontiers in service science: Ride matching for peer-to-peer ride sharing: A review and future directions

Abstract

As a consequence of the sharing economy attaining more popularity, there has been a shift toward shared-use mobility services in recent years, especially those that encourage users to share their personal vehicles with others. To date, different variants of these services have been proposed that call for different settings and give rise to different research questions. Peer-to-peer (P2P) ride sharing is one such service that provides a platform for drivers to share their personal trips with riders who have similar itineraries. Unlike ride-sourcing services, drivers in P2P ride sharing have their own individual trips to make and are not driving for the sole purpose of serving rider requests. Unlike traditional carpooling, P2P ride sharing can serve on-demand and one-time trip requests. P2P ride sharing has been identified as a sustainable mode of transportation that results in several individual and societal benefits. The core of a P2P ride-sharing system is a ride-matching problem that determines ride-sharing plans for users. This paper reviews the major studies on the operations of P2P ride-sharing systems, with a focus on modeling and solution methodologies for matching, routing, and scheduling. In this paper, we classify ridesharing systems based on their operational features and review the existing methodologies for each class. We further discuss a number of important directions for future research.