Ridesharing: Simulator, Benchmark, and Evaluation

Ridesharing is becoming a popular mode of transportation with profound effects on the industry. Recent algorithms for vehicle-to-customer matching have been developed; yet cross-study evaluations of their performance and applicability to real-world ridesharing are lacking. Evaluation is complicated by the online and real-time nature of the ridesharing problem. In this paper, we develop a simulator for evaluating ridesharing algorithms, and we provide a set of benchmarks to test a wide range of scenarios encountered in the real world. These scenarios include different road networks, different numbers of vehicles, larger scales of customer requests, and others. We apply the benchmarks to several state-of-the-art search and join based ridesharing algorithms to demonstrate the usefulness of the simulator and the benchmarks. We find quickly-computable heuristics outperforming other more complex methods, primarily due to faster computation speed. Our work points the direction for designing and evaluating future ridesharing algorithms.