Transfer Problem in a Cloud-based Public Vehicle System with Sustainable Discomfort

The increasing population in urban areas gives rise to a huge traffic pressure. A cloud-based industrial system, public vehicle (PV) system, is promising to mitigate the traffic congestion in smart cities, where passengers can share PVs and transfer among them with scheduling decisions made by the cloud. This paper studies the transfer problem in the PV system due to that transfer can improve the whole traffic efficiency with sacrificing a little comfort with the corporation of all the PVs. The transfer problem is NP-Complete through our analysis. Our work can be separated into three steps. First, we introduce several factors to guarantee the comfort of passengers during transfer. Second, we propose two algorithms through the graph-based scheduling problem aiming at reducing the travel distance of all the PVs with service guarantee. Third, simulations based on the Shanghai (China) urban road network show that, the total travel distance of PVs is reduced under the quality of service for passengers, and the traffic efficiency is improved.