The evolutionary interaction between taxi-sharing behaviours and social networks

Mobility services increasingly consider the sharing of vehicles to reduce resource use and congestion. People are, however, reluctant to sharing vehicles with strangers. Therefore, this paper investigates the dynamic co-evolution of taxi-sharing behaviours and the taxi-sharing-oriented social network structure. A social network based taxi-sharing method is introduced that is able to prioritise taxi-sharing with acquaintances over strangers while capping the detour cost to reasonable and varied limits. Furthermore, the social network structure evolves and is updated based on shared trips. An empirical simulation demonstrates the advantages of social network based taxi-sharing, i.e., an increased match rate and a comparable satisfaction level to trip-based methods. The spatial aggregation of the emerging social network not only suggests a space-time searching heuristic for taxi-sharing, but also indicates how social factors conquer space while space constrains social interactions.