Shared ride trip planning in large transportation networks

Recent technology developments in miniaturization of computing devices, location-sensing technology and ubiquitous wireless networks in a single device enable new types of social behavior such as ad-hoc meetings of people in co-located geographical space. This book chapter investigates a novel usage type of this technology, ad-hoc shared-ride trip planning in transportation networks. Shared-ride trips involve transportation clients such as pedestrians arranging on a short-term basis with transportation hosts such as private automobiles or taxi cabs for flexible travel provision. However, assigning clients and hosts in an ad-hoc, timely manner challenges current trip planning approaches, in particular for non-scheduled hosts. Current approaches based on centralized services do not scale well nor provide optimal trip assignment in such a highly flexible and dynamic environment. Thus, we propose a novel approach considering the transportation network as an ad-hoc mobile geosensor network using a short-range, self-organizing strategy. This approach can be fully scalable if every new transportation request can be solved locally in the geosensor network, a property that we investigate by comparing different communication strategies between nodes in the system. We will demonstrate that local communication strategies save communication costs and still deliver near-tooptimal trips.

International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 2006

Recent developments in miniaturization of computing devices, in location-sensing technology and in ubiquitous short-range wireless networks enable new types of social behaviour such as short-term, ad-hoc meetings of people in co-located geographical space. This paper investigates a novel usage type of these technologies, ad-hoc shared-ride trip planning in transportation networks. Shared-ride trips involve transportation clients such as pedestrians travelling with transportation hosts such as private automobiles, buses, taxi cabs or trains. Assigning clients and hosts in an ad-hoc manner challenges current trip planning approaches, in particular for non-scheduled hosts. Thus, in the novel approach we consider the transportation network as an ad-hoc mobile geosensor network using a short-range, self organizing strategy. This approach can be fully scalable if every new transportation request can be solved locally in the geosensor network, a property that we investigate by comparing different communication strategies between nodes in the system. We will demonstrate that local communication strategies save communication costs and still deliver near-to-optimal trips.

ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2007

Ad-hoc shared-ride trip planning in an urban environment is a complex task within a non-deterministic transportation network. Mobile geosensor networks provide the technical environment for realizing ad-hoc shared-ride trip planning: Network nodes are autonomous agents that interact locally by ad-hoc short-range communication and arrange for shared rides. In a mobile geosensor network, communication costs are critical because of constraints regarding bandwidth, available energy, and memory. This paper introduces spatio-temporal concepts from time geography, which can be employed during the planning process to significantly reduce communication costs. We will integrate network-based algorithms and different wayfinding strategies to assist both shared-ride clients and hosts in finding optimal travel assignments. Multi-agent geosimulation in a real street network is used to demonstrate the applicability of the approach and quantitatively confirm the theoretically foreseen reduction in communication costs.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008

Shared ride systems match the travel demand of transport clients with the supply by vehicles, or hosts, such that the clients find rides to their destinations. A peer-to-peer shared ride system allows clients to find rides in an ad-hoc manner, by negotiating directly with nearby hosts via radio-based communication. Such a peer-to-peer shared ride system has to deal with various types of hosts, such as private cars and mass transit vehicles. Their different behaviors affect the negotiation process, and consequently the travel choices. In this paper, we present and discuss a model of a peer-to-peer shared ride system with different types of agents. The behavior of the model is investigated in a simulation of different communication and way-finding strategies. We demonstrate that different types of agents enrich the choices of the clients, and lead to local solutions that are nearly optimal.

2008

In today's society mobility plays an important role. The impulse to locomotion arises from the wish to participate in fundamental social systems, like education and work. One challenge for the future will be to handle the problems resulting from traffic. For the near future enhancing the efficiency of already existing traffic can be part of the solution and gives time to search for further solutions. This paper represents a concept for local shared ride trip planning and shows the results preserved by a simulation software that implements this ideas. It explains how a scalable solution can look like, which requirements exist for a communication protocol and which algorithms can be used for the routing problems within a shared ride planning.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004

This paper addresses the issue of how to disseminate relevant information to mobile agents within a geosensor network. Conventional mobile and location-aware systems are founded on a centralized model of information systems, typified by the client-server model used for most location-based services. However, in this paper we argue that a decentralized approach offers several key advantages over a centralized model, including robustness and scalability. We present an environment for simulating information dissemination strategies in mobile ad hoc geosensor networks. We propose several strategies for scalable, peer-to-peer information exchange, and evaluate their performance with regard to their ability to distribute relevant information to agents and minimize redundancy.

Vehicular ad-hoc networks, when combined with wireless sensor networks, are used in a variety of solutions for commercial, urban, and metropolitan areas, including emergency response, traffic, and environmental monitoring. In this work, we model buses in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) as a network of vehicular nodes equipped with wireless sensors. We developed a network simulation, based on the complete WMATA schedule, to model the network using opportunistic routing strategies. A web-based front-end was developed, using the Google Maps API, to provide a user-friendly display and control of the network map, input parameters, and simulated results. This application will provide users with a simplified method for modifying network parameters to account for a number of parameters and conditions, including simulation run period, starting time, and starting/ending positions.

Information Technology And Control, 2016

Ride-sharing promotes a way to better use empty seats in vehicles, thus saving expenses and reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. In most of the current ride-sharing portals over the Internet the users must explicitly enter information about origin, destination, route, time and date when searching for riders who fulfill their mobility needs. In this paper, we explore new opportunities of ride-sharing to proactively discover the most frequent trips of each user and automatically selecting trip mates for each itinerary. To this aim, we exploit the large number of people who gather together in heavily trafficked zones at certain times to deploy a smart Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) over their handheld devices. The smart VANET exchanges among the vehicles the information necessary for (i) matching the users' itineraries and particular preferences, and (ii) identifying like-minded riders for common routes. The approach has been validated by a VANET simulator and a prototype that was used by 46 users.

Proceedings of the …, 2010

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are an important research area due to the potential benefits they could bring to traffic optimisation in urban environments. The communication protocols used within such networks, due to the intrinsic properties of such environments, reflect a series of characteristics which set them apart from common approaches. Routing messages, using a carry-and-forward strategy without relying on epidemic protocols, are particularly hard to achieve because cars are in motion. We present such a routing protocol which uses location data and trajectory of the cars. The protocol not only minimizes the number of messages needed to transmit the data to the destination, but it also reduces the time interval needed for the transmission of messages between vehicles using the resources available at present in such environments. The protocol is designed for highly partitioned environments, affected by the dynamics of node connections within such networks.

2010

Recent technological advances in wireless communication and the pervasiveness of various wireless communication devices have offered novel and promising solutions to enable vehicles to communicate with each other, establishing a decentralized communication system. An emerging solution in this area is the Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), in which vehicles cooperate in receiving and delivering messages to each other. VANETs can provide a viable alternative in situations where existing infrastructure communication systems become overloaded, fail (due for instance to natural disaster), or inconvenient to use. Nevertheless, the success of VANETs revolves around a number of key elements, an important one of which is the way messages are routed between sources and destinations. Without an effective message routing strategy VANETs’ success will continue to be limited. In order for messages to be routed to a destination effectively, the location of the destination must be determined. Sinc...