Abstract

Taxicabs are certainly the most popular type of on-demand transportation service in urban areas because taxi dispatching systems offer more and better services in terms of shorter wait times and travel convenience. However, a shortage of taxicabs has always been critical in many urban contexts especially during peak hours and taxis have great potential to maximize their efficiency by employing shared-ride concept. There are recent successes in real-time ridesharing projects that are expected to bring substantial benefits on energy consumption and operation efficiency, and thus it is essential to develop advanced vehicle dispatch algorithms to maximize occupancy and minimize travel times in real-time. This paper investigates how taxi services can be improved by proposing shared-taxi algorithms and what type of objective functions and constraints could be employed to prevent excessive passenger detours. Hybrid Simulated Annealing (HSA) is applied to dynamically assign passenger requests efficiently and a series of simulations are conducted with two different taxi operation strategies. The simulation results reveal that allowing ride-sharing for taxicabs increases productivity over the various demand levels and HSA can be considered as a suitable solution to maximize the system efficiency of real-time ride sharing.