Issue No. 02 - Feb. (2018 vol. 30)
ISSN: 1041-4347
pp: 219-233
Na Ta , School of Journalism and Communication, Renmin University, Beijing, Haidian, China
Guoliang Li , Department of Computing Science, TNList, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Tianyu Zhao , Department of Computing Science, TNList, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Jianhua Feng , Department of Computing Science, TNList, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Hanchao Ma , Department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, WA
Zhiguo Gong , Department of Computer Science, Macau University, Macau, China
ABSTRACT
Ride-sharing (RS) has great values in saving energy and alleviating traffic pressure. Existing studies can be improved for better efficiency. Therefore, we propose a new ride-sharing model, where each driver has a requirement that if the driver shares a ride with a rider, the shared route percentage (i.e., the ratio of the shared route's distance to the driver's total travel distance) exceeds an expectation rate of the driver, e.g., 0.8. We consider two variants of this problem. The first considers multiple drivers and multiple riders and aims to compute driver-rider pairs to maximize the overall shared route percentage (SRP). We model this problem as the maximum weighted bigraph matching problem, where the vertices are drivers and riders, edges are driver-rider pairs, and edge weights are driver-rider's SRP. However, it is rather expensive to compute the SRP values for large numbers of driver-rider pairs on road networks. To address this problem, we propose an efficient method to prune many unnecessary driver-rider pairs and avoid computing the SRP values for every pair. To improve the efficiency, we propose an approximate method with error bound guarantee. The basic idea is that we compute an upper bound and a lower bound for each driver-rider pair in constant time. Then, we estimate an upper bound and a lower bound of the graph matching. Next, we select some driver-rider pairs, compute their real shortest-route distance, and update the lower and upper bounds of the maximum graph matching. We repeat above steps until the ratio of the upper bound to the lower bound is not larger than a given approximate rate. The second considers multiple drivers and a single rider and aims to find the top-$k$ drivers for the rider with the largest SRP. We first prune a large number of drivers that cannot meet the SRP requirements. Then, we propose a best-first algorithm that progressively selects the drivers with high probability to be in the top- $k$ results and prunes the drivers that cannot be in the top- $k$ results. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.
INDEX TERMS
Vehicles, Roads, Upper bound, Approximation algorithms, Position measurement, Computational modeling, Resource management
CITATION

N. Ta, G. Li, T. Zhao, J. Feng, H. Ma and Z. Gong, "An Efficient Ride-Sharing Framework for Maximizing Shared Route," in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge & Data Engineering, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 219-233, 2018.
doi:10.1109/TKDE.2017.2760880