A mathematical model for a ride-pooling problem with price discount as an incentive

The advent of smartphones equipped with the internet and GPS has revolutionized the way peopletravel, leading to the emergence of ride-sourcing companies to cater to the increasing demand fortransportation. However, this mode of transportation has had negative repercussions on trafficcongestion and air pollution, as individual rides result in many empty seats. To address these issues,some ride-sourcing platforms have introduced ride-sharing services, allowing people to share their rideswith others. In this paper, we present a mixed-integer nonlinear model that enables individuals to sharetheir rides with passengers who have close itineraries, thereby reducing trip fares as an incentive. Theprimary objective of this model is to maximize social welfare. Passengers who are willing to share theirrides submit their requests a day in advance via the platform. The platform then determines whether aperson can have a shared ride based on their pickup and drop-off time windows and locations or if theyshould travel individually. Shared rides are established by matching the information of other requesters.Passengers who take the shared ride will be incentivized with a price discount to compensate for theirinconvenience during the ride. We solved and validated this model using CPLEX software, and theresults demonstrate that social welfare can be improved through ride-pooling.

Keywords:

ride-pooling , social welfare , routing , matching , incentive