A distributed geographic information system for the daily car pooling problem

Following the difficulty of public transport to adequately cover all passenger transportation needs, different innovative mobility services are emerging. Among those are car pooling services, which are based on the idea that sets of car owners having the same travel destination share their vehicles. Until now these systems have bad a limited use due to lack of an efficient information processing and communication support. In this study an integrated system for the organization of a car pooling service is presented, using several current Information and Communication Technologies (ICT's) technologies: web, GIS and SMS. The core of the system is an optimization module which solves heuristically the specific routing problem. The system has been tested in a real-life case study. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.