A Study to Promote Car-Sharing by Adopting a Reputation System in a Multi-Agent Context

In recent years the increasing rate of vehicular traffic due to private mobility caused congestion and environmental impacts in urban contexts all over the world. To face such problems an important contribution might be given by transit systems. However, transit systems are characterized by a discontinuous spatial and time coverage so that other forms of mobility, like car-sharing, can be an effective complement to it by providing the same flexibility and comfort of private cars. Several studies confirmed that car-sharing is almost as highly appreciated as private cars but having the advantage of lower costs. For such reasons, in recent years the car-sharing market increased continuously as it has been resulting more and more attractive for investors, although its market share remains limited. To encourage the car-sharing philosophy, from one hand traditional car-sharing companies are trying to reduce operational costs to offer lower fares and, from the other hand, several individual owners are starting to share their cars suitably supported by technology. To promote car-sharing activities, in this paper a multi-agent system able to monitor car-sharing users’ driving habits is proposed. In particular, agents assist users in improving their driving, as well as in building their individual reputation measures over time. Such reputation scores can be used to allow the access to car-sharing services and personalized fares. Experiments on real and simulated data are encouraging and show the potentiality of this proposal.