Efficient algorithms for community aware ridesharing

Abstract

Ridesharing services have been becoming a prominent solution to reduce road traffic congestion and environmental pollution in urban areas. Existing ridesharing services fall apart in ensuring the social comfort of the riders. We formulate a Community aware Ridesharing Group Set (CaRGS) query that satisfies the spatial and social constraints of the riders and finds a set of ridesharing groups with the maximum number of served riders. The CaRGS query utilizes user social data in community levels to ensure user privacy. We show that the problem of finding CaRGS query answer is NP-Hard and propose two heuristic approaches: a hierarchical approach and an iterative approach to evaluate CaRGS queries. We evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency, and accuracy of our solution through extensive experiments using real datasets and present a comparative analysis among the proposed algorithms.