Smart ride share with flexible route matching

The concept of providing an on-line car pooling service to facilitate matching of drivers and riders has been around for a while. A number of systems or trials have also been built for use in university campuses or on-line communities. These systems however are quite restrictive in terms of the quality of matches and flexibility of pick-up/drop-off places, routes and schedules. Capitalizing on the ubiquitous wireless networks and GPS-enabled mobile devices, we have developed a smart ride-share system with an efficient scheduling algorithm for ride sharing, which can potentially achieve better vehicle utilization, energy consumption and user convenience. This paper describes the algorithms adopted in the system and presents a performance evaluation. The results show that with the proposed algorithm, ride-share scheduling can be achieved efficiently with large size of fleets.