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Satisfying user preferences in optimised ridesharing services:

A multi-agent multi-objective optimisation approach

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Abstract

Ridesharing services offer on-demand transportation solutions while improving the utilization of the available capacity of the vehicles on the road. Profit, travel time, and cost are the commonly optimized objectives in current ridesharing services. Existing multi-objective optimization-based services mainly focus on maximizing profit for service providers while minimizing the travel time for passengers. However, various personal preferences (e.g., co-riders’ gender for a passenger or preferred area of service for a driver) should be considered when offering such services. Such preferences are often conflicting with one another and with the objectives such as cost and travel time. Therefore finding an optimized solution and satisfying such preferences simultaneously is challenging. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a Multi-agent, Multi-objective, Preference-based ridesharing model (MaMoP) that offers an optimized ridesharing solution while satisfying users’ preferences simultaneously. MaMoP uses social-reasoning techniques to model preferences and their relations and employs evolutionary algorithms to find an optimized solution.

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Notes

  1. The proofs of all the equations can be found in [31].

  2. The formulation of this objective function is similar to RSP objective function, details in Section 3.2

  3. Queuing can be the result of delay in an expected service. In this context, the delay can be caused by the waiting time for matching a ride and the the time that takes the vehicles to return to the station after completing a journey. In many related work, service time is always considered exponentially distributed [28].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidade de São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, Brazil

    Vinicius Renan de Carvalho

  2. School of Computer Science, University College Dublin (UCD), Dublin, Ireland

    Fatemeh Golpayegani

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Correspondence to Vinicius Renan de Carvalho.

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de Carvalho, V.R., Golpayegani, F. Satisfying user preferences in optimised ridesharing services:. Appl Intell 52, 11257–11272 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-021-02887-1

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