A Variable Neighborhood Search for the University Carpooling

Carpooling is a promising policy intervention in traffic decongestion that consists in a shared use of private cars. Typically it is organized by a large company for encouraging its employees to pick up colleagues while driving to/from work. The core of the efficient management of such a service is to find an optimal matching between the users and their preferred routing (according to their origins, destinations and time windows). In this work we consider the special case when the users are university students. This case differs from the carpooling problems considered in the literature mainly for the following characteristics: • the users (students) can have very different timetables (depending on the classes attended); • drivers are able to set partial pre-arranged crews; • users may indicate other users they would prefer to car-pool with (friends) or they don’t want to (enemies); • besides the campus premises, users can select – as destination of their car pooling trips – the main railway and subway stations (to encourage intermodal transport).