Designing stable ride-sharing for commuting trip chain with role flexibility

Abstract In ride-sharing, fixing the roles of commuters with vehicles could come at an opportunity of missed balance between riders and drivers. The decisions made by commuters with vehicles about roles are related to both to-work travel and return-home travel. Commuters may choose not to drive when they have a confirmed ride back home. This study designs a stable ride-sharing model with role flexibility for the commuting trip chain. The preferences of commuters over matching partners in trip chains are formulated. A stable matching algorithm based on commuting trip chain is designed. To assess the performance of the proposed model and algorithm, real-life data from a resident trip survey in Dalian are used to design experimental cases. The results indicate that stable matching based on the trip chain is not a consequence of the repetition of successive one-period stable matching. Compared with matching in two phases, the matching rate of commuters increases by an average of 10%. When the number of commuters with role flexibility increases by four times, the matching rate of commuters increases by an average of 5.6%.