Algorithm Engineering for Software-Defined Public Transportation (PTaxi: Combining Taxi-sharing and Public Transit)

Mobility plays a pivotal role in our daily lives, enabling con-
nectivity with the world. Traffic problems have long been a topic of
discussion and remain relevant to this day. One critical issue is traffic
congestion, due to the high number of private vehicles, especially dur-
ing rush hours. To address this issue, our research focuses on two key
solutions: taxi-sharing and public transit. Taxi-sharing, where multiple
passengers with different origins and destinations share a taxi, offers the
flexibility of on-demand rides while optimizing the number of vehicles
on the road. Public transit, on the other hand, leverages well-built in-
frastructure, allowing passengers to travel from one station to another
on dedicated lanes. With recent technological advances, such as real-
time data processing and advanced routing algorithms, it is possible to
incorporate multiple modalities of transport within a single trip. Our
research targets the multi-modal transportation problem by combining
taxi-sharing and public transit to provide users with flexibility while uti-
lizing the static public transit network. We focus on a particularly appli-
... mehr
cable scenario, where taxi-sharing is employed at the beginning and end
of a public transit journey, connecting users from their exact locations to
public transit stations and from public transit stations to their desired
destination. To accomplish this, we introduce PTaxi, an algorithm that
combines existing state-of-the-art algorithms for taxi-sharing and public
transit into a single framework. Although several studies have aimed to
achieve this combined mode of transport, most do not calculate exact
routes or offer real-time responses. Our project fills this gap by design-
ing, developing, and evaluating the PTaxi algorithm to find an optimal
multi-modal route.