Towards ridesharing with passenger transfers

Abstract

Ridesharing services have the potential to fill empty seats in cars, reduce emissions and enable more efficient transportation. We propose rideshare services which transfer passengers between multiple drivers. By planning for transfers, we increase the availability and range of the rideshare service, and reduce the total vehicular miles travelled by the network. We propose three heuristics to schedule rideshare routes with transfers. Each provides a tradeoff in effectiveness and computational cost. We demonstrate these tradeoffs and the advantage of transfers in simulation.