Authors:
Avinash Nagarajan
1
;
Alan McGibney
2
;
Pio Fenton
3
and
Ignacio Castiñeiras
1
Affiliations:
1
Department of Computer Science, Munster Technological University, Cork, Ireland
;
2
NIMBUS Centre, Munster Technological University, Cork, Ireland
;
3
Teaching & Learning Unit, Munster Technological University, Cork, Ireland
Keyword(s):
Ride-Sharing, Smart Energy Communities, Green Computing, Optimisation.
Abstract:
This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a community-based, reactive ride-sharing service that promotes carbon-neutral management of city commutes using autonomous vehicles. The problem is formulated as a variant of the classical Dynamic Vehicle Routing problem with Time Windows, considering both dynamic resources and requests over a simulated time horizon. A solution approach is provided, based on an algorithm following a reactive-based simulation on top of a greedy decision-making process. A parameterised instance generator is developed to align existing benchmarks (i.e. Google HashCode) and public datasets (i.e. NYC taxis) to the proposed problem formulation and to enable testing of the solution under various configurations. The ride-sharing service is proven to scale well, when applied to very large instances, it provides fast and competitive results, both in terms of trip petitions satisfied and overall distance traversed.