Car Pooling Based on Trajectories of Drivers and Requirements of Passengers

Abstract

Car pooling is a collective transportation model based on shared use of private cars. The objective of car pooling is to reduce the number of cars in use by grouping people. By exploiting car pooling model, it can significantly reduce congestion, fuel consumption, air pollution, parking demands and commuting costs. This paper aims to develop a prototype car pooling system to match passengers and drivers based on their trajectories. We propose a heuristic method to solve the car pooling problem. In our approach, we collect the trajectory data of passengers and drivers first. We then propose a matching algorithm to assign passengers to drivers' cars based on their trajectories. The car pooling system proposed in this study combines a matching algorithm that is seamlessly integrated with Google Maps API, dynamic web pages and database system. We also conduct experiments to illustrate our proposed method.