“Not just a taxi”? For-profit ridesharing, driver strategies, and VMT

Profit Optimization in Commercial Ridesharing

Ridesharing is undoubtedly appealing from a sustainability perspective; however, profit optimization is very important for commercial providers. As such, ridesharing offers a valuable opportunity to garner profit by reducing the number of driver-miles that need to be paid for in order to serve the same set of passengers. In this paper, we study profit optimization for commercial ridesharing ser...

Taxi Driver Assistant – A Proposal for a Recommendation System

Taxi is a flexible way of transportation; however, with the fast growth of urban areas, the task of finding new passenger quickly becomes a challenging task for taxi drivers. In this work, we propose a recommendation system to assist taxi drivers searching for the next pick-up. With an inference engine based on a naïve Bayesian classifier, we analyze taxi-GPS traces collected in Lisbon, Portuga...

Dynamic Taxi and Ridesharing: A Framework and Heuristics for the Optimization Problem

In this paper we study a dynamic problem of ridesharing and taxi sharing with time windows. We consider a scenario where people needing a taxi or interested in getting a ride use a phone app to designate their source and destination points in a city, as well others restrictions (such as maximum allowable time to be at the destination). On the other hand, we have taxis and people interested in g...

Impact of Detour-Aware Policies on Maximizing Profit in Ridesharing

This paper provides efficient solutions to maximize profit for commercial ridesharing services, under a pricing model with detour-based discounts for passengers. We propose greedy heuristics for real-time ride matching that offer different trade-offs between optimality and speed. Simulations on New York City (NYC) taxi trip data show that our heuristics are up to 90% optimal and 10 times faster...

Not-for-profit hospitals underuse short-term financing strategies.