An Efficient Dynamic Ridesharing Algorithm

In this paper, we propose a scheduling algorithm for ridesharing. It efficiently serves real-time requests sent by passengers and generates ride sharing schedules that try to meet users' demands. In our method, we first propose a taxi searching algorithm using binary search strategy to quickly and efficiently retrieve candidate taxis that are likely to satisfy a trip request. A scheduling algorithm is then proposed. It checks each candidate taxi and insert the request trip into the schedule of the taxi which satisfies the request with the maximum average satisfaction. We evaluated our system using a large scale taxi dataset containing 101,952 trips in Beijing Chaoyang district. Results showed that our approach serves 40% additional taxi users while saving 30% travel distance compared with no-ridesharing.