Novel online routing algorithms for smart people-parcel taxi sharing services

Building smart transportation services in urban cities has become a worldwide problem owing to the rapidly increasing global population and the development of Internet-of-Things applications. Traffic congestion and environmental concerns can be alleviated by sharing mobility, which reduces the number of vehicles on the road network. The taxi-parcel sharing problem has been considered as an efficient planning model for people and goods flows. In this paper, we enhance the functionality of a current people-parcel taxi sharing model. The adapted model analyzes the historical request data and predicts the current service demands. We then propose two novel online routing algorithms that construct optimal routes in real-time. The objectives are to maximize (as far as possible) both the parcel delivery requests and ride requests while minimizing the idle time and travel distance of the taxis. The proposed online routing algorithms are evaluated on instances adapted from real Cabspotting datasets. After implementing our routing algorithms, the total idle travel distance per day was 9.64% to 12.76% lower than that of the existing taxi-parcel sharing method. Our online routing algorithms can be incorporated into an efficient smart shared taxi system.