QA-share: Towards efficient QoS-aware dispatching approach for urban taxi-sharing

Taxi-sharing allows occupied taxis to pick up new passengers on the fly, promising to reduce waiting time for taxi riders and increase productivity for drivers. However, if not carefully designed, taxi-sharing may cause more harm than benefit — it becomes harder to strike the balance between driver's profit and passenger's quality of service (e.g. travel time, number of strangers that share a taxi, etc.). In this paper, we propose a QoS-aware taxi-sharing system design — QA-Share — by addressing two important challenges. First, QA-Share aims to maximize driver profit and user experience at the same time. Second, QA-Share continuously optimizes these two metrics by dynamically adapting its schedule as new requests arrive, without entering an oscillation state. To address these two challenges, we have formulated the optimization problem using integer linear programming, and derived the optimal solution under a small system scale. When the number of requests and taxis becomes large, we have devised a heuristic algorithm that has a much faster execution time. We have also studied how to minimize oscillations caused by schedule re-calculations by dynamically tuning the update threshold. We have evaluated our approach with real-world dataset in a Chinese city — ZhenJiang — which contains the GPS traces recorded by over 3,000 taxis during a period of three months in 2013. Our results show that the QoS and profit is increased by 38% compared to earlier schemes.