A Multi-modal Routing Approach Combining Dynamic Ride-sharing and Public Transport

Ride-sharing facilitates cheap and eco-friendly mobility. In contrast to classical ride-sharing that basically works like a notice-board, dynamic ride-sharing allows a passenger to get a lift on a section of a driver's route and, if necessary, re-routes the driver. On a dynamic ride-sharing platform, drivers provide their routes and passengers specify queries consisting of departure and arrival location as well as a time for the journey. The platform computes suitable matches of driver routes and passenger queries, and proposes them to both parties. State-of-the-Art platforms for public transport routing and dynamic ride-sharing provide unimodal connections but do not combine both transport modes. The challenge is that the driver routes are not static but could be changed significantly if the driver accepts the detour to pick up the passenger and drop him / her off at his / her destination. Thus, a driver's route may result in a number of dynamic ride-sharing offers, namely all possible connections between pick up and drop off points with an acceptable detour for the driver. In this paper, we present a solution that integrates dynamic ride-sharing into our existing multi-criteria intermodal travel information system. We solve two challenges: First, we allow dynamic ride-sharing between two train rides by connecting public transport stations by dynamic ride-sharing offers of drivers. For this, we integrate driver offers into our graph model, which represents the public transport timetable. Second, we find suitable dynamic ride-sharing offers of drivers who can take the passenger from his / her start location to a public transport station or from a station to the queried destination location. In our computational study, compared to unimodal train connections, we obtain a significant improvement of the results by combining public transport and dynamic ride-sharing