The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Optimal Route Planning

Hitchhiking is the oldest ridesharing process without prior arrangements by the ride sharers. It usually involves uncertain waiting times and various combinations of lifts on roads. For this way of travelling, the problem of finding an optimal route is extremely important and has not been studied. We propose the concept of a hitchhiking graph to represent all possible decisions that a hitchhiker can consider on a road network. We develop an efficient pruning technique for a faster computation of the optimal route with the least expected journey time. The effectiveness of our methods is evaluated on road networks of selected countries.