PoliUniPool: a carpooling system for universities

Carpooling is a transport system based on a shared use of private cars. The mobility managers of the Università Statale and Politecnico di Milano universities are interested in promoting the use of such system among their students and employees. The paper presents an ongoing project to design, implement and test PoliUniPool, a car pooling service for such universities. The main characteristics of the PoliUniPool service are the following: (1) the use of the system is restricted to employees, faculty and students of the two universities; (2) besides suggesting a matching between the users, the system provides the expected schedule for their trips; (3) in addition to the campus premises, users can select – as destination of their car pooling trips – the main railway and subway stations, in order to encourage the most environmental friendly means; (4) users are informed immediately in case of delay or changes, to improve the reliability of the service; (5) the system estimates the costs for each user, in order to let the users know how to share them; (6) the system has some social network functionalities, e.g. drivers are able to set partial prearranged crews; and users may indicate other users they would prefer to car-pool with (“friends”) or they don’t want to (“I don’t like him/her”). A web-based software tool has been implemented to manage the matching of the users. In order to solve the carpooling problem, we use an heuristics, based on a guided Monte Carlo method. The algorithm minimizes an objective function, subject to user time windows and car capacity constraints. The objective function is a weighted sum of different terms in order to maximize the number of served users, minimizing the total route length, and maximizing the satisfied user preferences (e.g. friends). The result is a matching between drivers and passengers, their schedules and the routes to be driven by each driver. The trial of the proposed service will start on September 2011 and will take into account how to introduce and promote the service, identifying regulation, incentives, modalities, and marketing actions.