A demonstration of SHAREK: an efficient matching framework for ride sharing systems

Recently, many ride sharing systems have been commercially introduced (e.g., Uber, Flinc, and Lyft) forming a multi-billion dollars industry. The main idea is to match people requesting a certain ride to other people who are acting as drivers on their own spare time. The matching algorithm run by these services is very simple and ignores a wide sector of users who can be exploited to maximize the benefits of these services. In this demo, we demonstrate SHAREK; a driver-rider matching algorithm that can be embedded inside existing ride sharing services to enhance the quality of their matching. SHAREK has the potential to boost the performance and widen the user base and applicability of existing ride sharing services. This is mainly because within its matching technique, SHAREK takes into account user preferences in terms of maximum waiting time the rider is willing to have before being picked up as well as the maximum cost that the rider is willing to pay. Then, within its course of execution, SHAREK applies a set of smart filters that enable it to do the matching so efficiently without the need to many expensive shortest path computations.