Ridesharing is a promising method to address transportation problems such as traffic jams and parking. Although traditional carpooling and taxi ridesharing have been investigated by many, slugging, as a simple yet effective form of ridesharing, has not been well-studied. In this paper, we formally define the slugging problem and its generalization. We provide proofs of their computational time complexity. For the variants of the slugging problem that are constrained by the vehicle capacity and travel time delay, we prove NP-completeness and also propose some effective heuristics. In addition, we discuss the dynamic slugging problem. We conducted experiments using a GPS trajectory data set containing 60 thousand trips. The experimental results show that our proposed heuristics can achieve close-to-optimal performances, which means as much as 59% saving in vehicle travel distance.
It is proved that the computational time complexity of the slugging problem is NPcomplete REF .
Analysis and evaluation of the slugging form of ridesharing
SIGSPATIAL'13
Computer Science