Mitigating traffic congestion: Solving the ride-matching problem by Bee Colony Optimization

Urban road networks in many countries are severely congested. Expanding traffic network capacities by building more roads is very costly as well as environmentally damaging. Researchers, planners, and transportation professionals have developed various Travel Demand Management (TDM) techniques, i.e. strategies that increase travel choices to travelers. Ride sharing is one of the widely used TDM techniques that assumes the participation of two or more persons that together share a vehicle when traveling from few origins to few destinations. In ride-matching systems, commuters wishing to participate in ride sharing are matched by where they live and work, and by their work schedule. There is no standard method in the open literature to determine the best ride-matching method. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop the methodology capable to solve the ride-matching problem. The proposed Bee Colony Optimization Metaheuristic is sufficiently general and could be applied to various combinatorial optimization problems.