ε-Ride: An Adaptive Event-Driven Windowed Matching Framework in Ridesharing

Ridesharing services aim at reducing the users' travel cost and optimizing the drivers' routes to satisfy passengers' expected maximum matching times in practice request dispatching. Existing works can be roughly classified into two types, i.e., online-based and batch-based methods, in which the former mainly focus on responding quickly to the requests and the latter focuses on enumerating request combinations meticulously to improve the service quality. However, online-based methods perform poorly in terms of service quality due to the neglect of the sharing relationship between requests, while batch-based methods fail on efficiency. None of these works can smoothly balance the service quality and matching time cost since the matching window is not sufficiently explored or even neglected. To cope with this problem, we propose a novel framework epsilon-Ride, which comprehensively leverages the matching time window based on the event model. Specifically, an adaptive windowed matching algorithm is proposed to adaptively consider personalized matching time and provide a matching solution with higher service rates at lower latencies. Besides, we maintain the request groups through a mixed graph and further integrate the subsequent arrival requests to optimize the matching results, which can scale to or satisfy online use demands. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed method.