Optimization of Ride Sharing Systems Using Event-driven Receding Horizon Control

Abstract: We develop an event-driven Receding Horizon Control (RHC) scheme for a Ride Sharing System (RSS) in a transportation network where vehicles are shared to pick up and drop off passengers so as to minimize a weighted sum of passenger waiting and traveling times. The RSS is modeled as a discrete event system and the event-driven nature of the controller significantly reduces the complexity of the vehicle assignment problem, thus enabling its real-time implementation. Simulation results using actual city maps and real taxi traffic data illustrate the effectiveness of the RH controller in terms of real-time implementation and performance relative to known greedy heuristics.