Abstract

A Mechanism for Dynamic Ride Sharing Based on Parallel Auctions
A Mechanism for Dynamic Ride Sharing Based on Parallel Auctions
Alexander Kleiner, Bernhard Nebel, Vittorio Amos Ziparo
Car pollution is one of the major causes of green-house emissions, and traffic congestion is rapidly becoming a social plague. Dynamic Ride Sharing (DRS) systems have the potential to mitigate this problem by computing plans for car drivers, e.g. commuters, allowing them to share their rides. Existing efforts in DRS are suffering from the problem that participants are abandoning the system after repeatedly failing to get a shared ride. In this paper we present an incentive compatible DRS solution based on auctions. While existing DRS systems are mainly focusing on fixed assignments that min- imize the totally travelled distance, the presented approach is adaptive to individual preferences of the participants. Furthermore, our system allows to tradeoff the minimization of Vehicle Kilometers Travelled (VKT) with the overall probability of successful ride-shares, which is an important fea- ture when bootstrapping the system. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to present a DRS solution based on auctions using a sealed-bid second price scheme.