A survey on taxi-sharing system

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A survey on taxi-sharing system"

by

Mr. Shanfeng ZHANG


Abstract:

Modern cities suffer from an inefficient transportation system, which leads to 
traffic congestion, waste of energy and difficulties in finding parking lots 
and hailing a taxi during rush hours. One major cause of such inefficiency is 
that the passenger seats are under-utilized. As one of the promising solutions, 
taxi-sharing refers to a mode of transportation where people share a taxi with 
others who have similar itineraries and schedules. Compared with carpooling or 
recurring ridesharing, taxi-sharing is more challenging as both passengers’ 
queries and positions of taxis are highly dynamic and unpredictable.

This article surveys existing research on taxi-sharing. We first introduce data 
preparation for a taxi-sharing system, including basic definitions and map 
decomposition. We then group existing works into three categories according to 
their optimization objectives: 1) minimize service costs, 2) maximize service 
quality, 3) optimize a combined objective. Service costs can be defined as the 
distance traveled by vehicles, the number of vehicles or the fuel costs; 
Service quality refers to passenger satisfaction, such as the service delay of 
a request or the number of serviced requests; Others aim to optimize a combined 
objective by considering both service costs on driver side and service quality 
on passenger side. We conclude this survey by discussing future directions for 
taxi-sharing systems.


Date:                   Thursday, 27 March 2014

Time:                   11:30am - 1:30pm

Venue:                  Room 5506
                         Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:      Dr. Yunhao Liu (Supervisor)
                         Prof. Lionel Ni (Supervisor)
                         Dr. Lei Chen (Chairperson)
                         Prof. Sing-Chi Cheung
                         Dr. Ke Yi


**** ALL are Welcome ****