Ride-sharing Co-passenger Allocation Using Contact Priority
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Solution Overview
Problem
Ride-sharing systems face challenges in providing a comfortable and cost-effective experience for passengers, as they often have to share vehicles with strangers, leading to decreased passenger satisfaction and increased carbon emissions due to inefficient vehicle usage.
Innovation Solution
A method and system that allocates co-passengers based on the passenger's preferences, using circuitry to retrieve and prioritize phone numbers of friends, family, and acquaintances, determining approval status and assigning priorities based on historical interactions, and calculating shared-ride fares, allowing passengers to choose comfortable co-passengers and receive differential pricing.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Object-generated harmful factors
If multiple passengers share a vehicle on a shared-basis, then the ride-fare is divided among passengers and CO2 emissions decrease, but passengers feel uncomfortable sharing with strangers
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies local quality by differentiating between different types of co-passengers based on their relationship to the passenger. It retrieves phone numbers from the passenger's device, determines approval status for each contact, and assigns priorities based on historical interactions. This allows the system to prioritize familiar individuals (family, friends, acquaintances) over strangers, creating a localized quality improvement in passenger comfort while maintaining the overall ride-sharing benefit of reduced emissions.
2Ease of operation
If the system retrieves and processes multiple phone numbers in real-time, then co-passenger allocation becomes personalized and comfortable, but the system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary action by retrieving all relevant phone numbers from the passenger's device in advance (from contacts, messaging apps, calling apps) before the ride request is processed. It pre-determines approval status for each contact and pre-calculates priorities based on historical data. This preliminary processing reduces the computational burden during real-time ride allocation, managing system complexity while maintaining high-quality personalized allocation.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies self-service by utilizing the passenger's own device data (phone contacts, messaging history, calling history) to automatically identify and prioritize co-passengers. The passenger's device serves as the source of truth for relationship information, eliminating the need for the system to maintain separate databases of social relationships. This reduces system complexity by leveraging existing data infrastructure while enabling personalized allocation.
3Measurement precision
If the system assigns priority based on multiple factors including historical calls and rides, then co-passenger selection accuracy improves, but the data processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary action by pre-calculating priority scores for each contact based on multiple factors (approval status, frequency of historical calls, time duration, passenger preference, rating, number of historical rides, distance) before the ride allocation decision is needed. This pre-processing allows the system to have co-passenger priorities ready when a ride request comes in, reducing real-time processing time while maintaining high selection accuracy based on comprehensive historical data analysis.
Data Source
AI summary
A method and a system for allocating co-passengers in a ride-sharing system is provided. A shared-ride request is received from a passenger device of a passenger along with one or more phone numbers of one or more individuals associated with the passenger. An approval status of each of the one or more phone numbers is determined. A priority is assigned to each of the one or more phone numbers. A co-passenger from the one or more individuals for the shared-ride is identified based on one of the determined approval status or the assigned priority of the phone number associated with the co-passenger. A shared-ride fare is determined for the passenger for the shared-ride with the identified co-passenger.