Ridesharing in Muscat: Can it be a Sustainable Solution for the Traffic Congestion?

We deal with developing a Decision Support System (DSS) to promote the ridesharing among both students and staff of a big organization. The DSS includes a set of functions that allow the management of the riders’ requests and drivers’ availability and embeds a novel two-phase optimization approach that helps in defining the optimal riders-drivers matching. The first phase consists of solving a constraint programming model that generates all the feasible routes. Then, the second phase a bin packing based model is solved to find the optimal route for every driver in order to serve the set of riders assigned to her vehicle. We conclude by an illustrative example that shows the validity of our DSS and, finally, by a discussion on the possible commercialization of such a platform.