Agent Behavior in Peer-to-Peer Shared Ride Systems

Shared ride systems match the travel demand of transport a client with the supply of vehicles, or hosts, so that the client find rides to their destinations. A peer-to-peer shared ride system allows a client to find rides in an ad-hoc manner, by negotiating directly with nearby hosts via radio-based communication. Such a peer-to-peer shared ride system has to deal with various types of hosts, such as private cars, taxicabs and mass transit vehicles. Agents, i.e. a client and hosts, have diverse behaviors in such systems. Their different behaviors affect the negotiation process, and consequently the travel choices. Preliminary research (Winter et al. 2005) has investigated peer-to-peer shared ride systems with homogeneous hosts and Immobile client. This thesis extends their work to multiple types of agents. It focuses on what are typical agent behaviors in peer-to-peer shared ride systems, and how these behaviors affect negotiation processes in a dynamic transport environment. This thesis presents and discusses a model of a peer-to-peer shared ride system with diverse types of hosts and one a client with different levels of knowledge. Agents’ typical natures and behaviors contributing to peer-to-peer shared ride systems are identified and formalized in the model. This multi-agent model allows testing different communication and way-finding strategies in peer-to-peer shared ride systems. The inheritance design of the model makes it easy to extend and suitable for other related investigations and further research. A computer simulation is employed to implement this model. Experiments are designed to test agent behaviors under different communication and way-finding strategies. The results of experiments demonstrate that different types of agents enrich the choices of the client, and lead to local solutions that are nearly optimal.