A novel algorithm for peer-to-peer ridesharing match problem

Abstract

Peer-to-peer (P2P) ridesharing is a promising mode of transportation that has gained popularity during the recent years. The widespread use of smart phones, mobile application development platforms and online payment systems provide new opportunities to enable P2P ridesharing. In this paper, we introduce a notion of two-sided matching to build a single-driver multiple-rider stable matching ridesharing model and propose a heuristic algorithm to establish stable or nearly stable matches. We conduct extensive numerical experiments to demonstrate the computational efficiency of the proposed algorithm and show its practical applicability to reasonably sized P2P ridesharing contexts. The results show that we can significantly increase the stability of ridesharing matching solutions at the cost of only a small degradation in system-wide performance.