Dynamic Ride Sharing Community Service on Traffic Information Grid

Traffic congestion is a severe problem in urban areas of many countries. The adoption of ITS make commuters' travel convenient but cannot eliminate automobiles from the highways. The existing ridesharing services increase the efficiency of the transportation network but is limited by self-issues. Our approach is a dynamic ride sharing community service architecture combining ITS, ridesharing and social networking. The architecture makes use of heterogeneous and dynamic resources in traffic information grid system to provide immediate and dynamic ride sharing service. Simultaneously, the location information collected in ridesharing helps to improve the performances of traffic services in ITS. In addition, it contributes to the formation of travel community with underlying physical transportation networking to support. A prototype system is developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the architecture.