Carpooling in urban areas: A real-time service case-study

Abstract

The realization of the smart city paradigm relies on the implementation of various innovative systems. Among the sectors of interest for a smart city, the sustainable transport is a key service where carpooling solutions are gaining more and more popularity in the last years. The most widespread use of the carpooling relies on a bakeca approach (i.e., the trips are planned well in advance), which is however not suitable in urban areas where the users are looking for an immediate companion. In this paper, we focus on the challenge of a real-time carpooling service and provide the following contribution: the Clacsoon platform is described, which is intended to make easy for the clacsooners to find the companion of the trip; an emulation system is implemented, which is used to generate increasing numbers of users that interact with the Clacsoon platform to evaluate the performance; based on the emulator, extensive trials are implemented to analyse the quality of experience provided to the users varying the characteristics of the population; from the results we extract important information about the challenges to be addressed for successful deployments of a real-time carpooling service.