Ride Pooling in Free Floating Car Sharing

Abstract: Even though car sharing is already a widespread business concept and part of the shared mobility approach shaping the future of the automotive industry to some extent, the incorporation of ride pooling within the car sharing framework is not yet a fixed component of the existing models. Hence, the purpose of this thesis is to investigate the potential of including the possibility of ride sharing in terms of fleet size, cost and profit optimization for a free floating car sharing model. This is done by building three different mathematical models and extending them by certain cost parameters. One of the three mentioned models is the Ride Share Matching approach, which focuses more on the actual ride sharing process than on a real business case with respect to a company. The latter is then covered by the other two approaches, namely the Dial-a-Ride-Problem and a modification of it with better running time called the Task Graph model. Test runs on those three models with randomly generated instances show that the potential of ride sharing is undoubtedly existent.