Ride matching and vehicle routing for on-demand mobility services

On-Demand Mobility Services (ODMS) have gained considerable popularity over the past few years. Travelers use mobile phone applications to easily request a ride, update trip itinerary and pay the ride fare. This paper describes a novel methodology for integrated ride matching and vehicle routing for ODMS with ridesharing and transfer options. The methodology adopts a hybrid heuristic approach, which enables solving medium to large problem instances in near real-time. The solution of this problem will be a set of routes for vehicles and a ride match for each passenger. The heuristic (1) promptly responds to individual ride requests, and (2) periodically re-evaluates the generated solutions and recommend modifications to enhance the overall solution quality by increasing the number of served passengers and total profit of the system. The results of a set of experiments considering hypothetical and real-world networks show that the methodology can provide efficient solutions while satisfying the real-time execution requirements. In addition, the results show that the Transportation Network Company (TNC) could serve more passengers and achieve higher profitability if more passengers are willing to rideshare or transfer. Also, activating a rollback procedure increases the number of served passengers and associated profits.