Optimization Algorithm Design for the Taxi-Sharing Problem and Application

Abstract

With the development of mobility techniques, the transportation systems become smarter, pursuing higher goals, such as convenience for passengers and low cost. In this work, we investigate the taxi-sharing system, which is a promising system recently. The passengers can share the same taxis to different destinations to save cost. Considering the property of taxis' routes, the corresponding model is established and our aim is to design the trip for each taxi to reduce the total number of taxi trips in the whole system if one taxi can be shared by several passengers. Compared with the previous work, we do not have any constraint about the taxi stations. The taxi trips have more flexibility in reality. We analyze this problem and prove it is NP-Complete. There are two proposed algorithms to solve this problem, one is a heuristic algorithm and the other is an approximate algorithm. In the experiment, two real-world taxi data sets are tested, and our algorithm shows the superiority of our taxi-sharing system. Using the taxi-sharing system, the number of trips can be reduced by about 30%.