A Dynamic Carpooling System with Social Network Based Filtering

 

Sasikumar C¹*, Jaganathan S²

¹Assistant Professor, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Kumaraguru College of Technology, Coimbatore, India.

²Professor, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Dr. NGP Institute of Technology, Coimbatore, India.

 

ABSTRACT:

In this 21st century, India is the second largest populated country in the world. According to the future projection of population growth, India will reach more than 5.4 billion people around 2030. Population is concentrated more in urban areas than in rural areas. People prefer to travel by car than using a public transport system. As a result, the problem of traffic congestion increases heavily. In order to overcome the problem, a Real time ridesharing is proposed. This method is put into an operation by developing an Android application. Real time ridesharing is an extension of carpooling to best suite one’s preferences using the data composed from Social networking. It enables users, particularly colleagues, classmates to share their vehicle among the fellow passengers to the same or nearby destination. The system gives real time guidance in a map, with addition to ridesharing. Users can either set their travel to be private or public by making to available to some of their friends using privacy settings. The concept can also be extended to taxis and rickshaws and can also be implemented in any other public transport systems. Execution can be done by integrating with social networking sites, by identifying the location using GPS. For simplicity this is mainly incorporated in mobile phones. The system supports the use of mass public transport system and taking a trip together will become obligatory to manage the depletion of fuel, making the atmosphere green and to control traffic.

 

 

INTRODUCTION:

The Industrial technology is growing infinitely day by day. People move around from one urban to another urban to seek for jobs^1,2,3,. This leads to enormous increase in transportation services and pollution is increasing at an alarming rate. Another restraint to be noted is that natural resources like petrol, diesel is exploited. To surmount these above problems we put forward a idea called “CARPOOLING”.

 

In order to reduce fuel consumption, to decrease traffic jam during peak hours and to improve the parking facilities, carpooling is essential. Carpooling is an arrangement which shares the ride in a private or a public vehicle with two or more individuals. The total expenditure for this application is very less as it divides the money among the fellow passengers^4,5. Real-time ridesharing opts also for onetime rideshares within a short notice. The system mainly includes three currently prominent technologies such as GPS, which is used to locate the route information, and the driver’s, passenger’s location. The Android phones which had created a revolution in this century, is used as an interface between the riders and the requestors. All the social networking sites such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter etc., establish a correlation between the riders and the requestors for trust and accountability. Carpooling can also be implemented in many ways such as designated driver carpool, alternating carpool, employer carpool, and vanpool carpool⁷. Real Time ridesharing supports in utilizing the empty seats in any type of vehicles. The Government should encourage the carpooling method among the people in the country through advertisements, by programmes through which it can reach the community easily. The biggest advantage is that carpooling can supports areas not covered by the public transport system ².

 

RELATED WORKS:

The growth of urbanization is increasing and people prefer to travel to travel in their own vehicle than using a public transport system. Therefore the problems in global warming, traffic congestion, depletion of fuel arises^2,3,4,5. A social based community for carpooling has been proposed for both the rider and the passenger in order for reduction of fuel costs by sharing among the fellow passengers¹. The implications for environment sustainability are sufficiently high¹. The system elaborates about the usage of carpooling android application and also discusses about the major advantages of carpooling³. The System architecture for carpooling is greatly identifies and major implementation of android application relies on GPS based navigation devices, smart phones, social media for trust and accountability⁴. A proposed system for carpooling has been efficiently discussed by prototype design, route matching algorithms and it also discusses about the advantages and disadvantages of   carpooling⁵.

 

This paper has mainly discussed about the current scenario of Delhi city. It also includes a brief calculation of growth of motor vehicles and cars in Delhi and also the distribution of population and vehicles in Delhi. This paper mainly deals with the data analysis of the total number of cars. Impact of revenue has also been calculated⁶. This paper mainly describes the innovations of ridesharing service relying on advanced mobile technologies. This type of ridesharing attempts to provide added flexibility to rideshare arrangements by allowing drivers and passengers to arrange occasionally shared rides. It also discuss about the advantages, disadvantages, economic challenges, social/behavioral challenges, Institutional challenges, Technological challenges, Opportunities and challenges of ridesharing. The Rideshare challenge is a series of economic, behavioral, institutional, technological    obstacles⁷. A case study detailing about carpooling has been efficiently proposed⁹.

 

In general there are many algorithms for finding the shortest path to be effected. Dijkstra's algorithm for finding the shortest path is discussed efficiently which is one major advantage for reducing the fuel content¹⁰. The road networks and congestion of Delhi city has been discussed with the statistics of average number of cars, vehicles that run in Delhi city¹¹. The system provides all the advantages using GPS based navigation system and also has additional SMS based alerts in order to provide transparency with both the rider and passengers. This system is user friendly¹². A novel based heuristic method is proposed for carpooling¹³.The actual architecture and working of carpooling is discussed which is widely used in Smart phones¹⁴.

 

METHODS AND APPROACHES:

Architecture Diagram:

Fig. 1 shows the architecture diagram of carpooling. The System consists of two participants - Driver and Rider.  Both of them access the ride sharing system through the ride sharing application installed in their mobile device. To participate in the ride sharing, both of them have to register for the first time using their mobile application. This registration and login process is effected by the registration service and the user account data is stored in the Accounts profile database. Apart from the login data, the accounts profile database also comprises of other details such as the user address, the organization where he/she is working, Facebook integration details such as friend list and the car type in case of a driver.

 

The process begins with the rider registering his ride through the mobile application. The ride registration data comprising of source, destination address and start time of the ride is then passed on to the Google geo coding service through the ride sharing service module. This module converts the physical address into Geo location coordinates and stores them in the Google fusion tables.  The rider after login searches for the ride through his mobile application. The ride request is processed by the ride sharing service. The rating service sorts each ride based on the review of the ride’s driver. Based on the rider’s preference a filter is applied based on the social networking data to include only the drivers who are in the friend’s circle of the rider. The filtered search result is presented to the rider along with the driver details. After the rider selects a driver, rider request is passed on to the driver’s mobile application by the ride sharing service¹⁶.

 

After the driver’s approval, driver and rider are enabled to communicate through the ride sharing application. Once the ride starts, ride tracking service starts tracking the ride using the GPS data from the user’s mobile device. This data is temporarily stored in the accounts profile database to provide assistance in case of an emergency. After the completion of the travel, rider provides the rating for the driver on a likert scale which is processed by the riding service and stored along with driver’s profile data in the accounts profile database.

 

 

Fig. 1. Architecture Diagram of Carpooling

 

 

MODULES:

There are three main modules in the paper and they are as follows

 

1. Module 1 (Mobile Client):

An Android client will be the interface to the user. The user marks his source and destination and uploads it. Using this information the client displays his ridesharing options. The client also provides facilities to communicate with other users who can be pooled.

 

2. Module 2 (Web Service):

The web service serves as the processing unit of our application. The mobile client transmits the user data to the web service. The web service stores this data in the database.  When the user requests his ridesharing options the web service queries the database for other users, filters the users who do not fit and sends only the appropriate users to the mobile client.

 

Purpose File:

Only the riders are considered for drivers and only the drivers are considered for riders.

 

Time Filtering:

Only the users who have uploaded data in the past hour are considered.

 

Bounds Filtering:

A virtual box is drawn around the paths of the users and if the boxes don’t overlap those users are not considered.

Route Filtering:

The routes of the users are compared and if there are sufficient matching points on the route they are considered. The above filters give the number of users who can be pooled with the requesting user in the path he/she has chosen.

 

The web service then checks for ridesharing in alternate paths. It then determines the most efficient path by using the formula

 

P = n/dt

Where,

P is the points to the route

n is the number of users who can be pooled in the route

d is the distance of the route

t is the time to travel through the route

The route with the highest point p is chosen as the most efficient route and is sent to the mobile client along with the users who can be pooled in that route.

 

3. Module 3 (Google Fusion Tables):

Google fusion table serves as the database to our project. This is a free service provided by Google to efficiently store Geopoints online.

 

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS:

1. Passenger and driver destination route:

The xml file of the login Activity has a linear layout with an input box for email id, another input box for password, a toggle button to select whether the user is a Rider or a Passenger and a button to login. It also has a register button for new users to register. On clicking the login button, the Check User () method is called, this method queries the Account Info table in the Fusion Tables and verifies if the given email id and password matches with any of the records in that table. If a match is found the user gets logged in and the Hello Maps Activity is called or else a message saying “Invalid username/password” is displayed.

When the user clicks the Register button in the Login Activity, the Register Activity pops up. The xml file of the Register Activity has input boxes for name, email id, password, address and mobile number. When the user enters these data and clicks the register button, the register () method is called. This method uploads these data to the Account Info table in the Fusion Table. This data is later used to authenticate the users.

Hello maps activity is the most important activity in our application. Once the user is authenticated the Hello Maps Activity is brought up. The xml file of this activity contains a vertical linear layout. The linear layout is predominatly occupied by the Map View and has a horizonntal linear layout of three buttons.

 

The users have to register themselves first after opening the application. The Google map will be displayed and the current location will be displayed. The destination location can be clicked and the destination is selected by selecting the set destination tab or the location can be uploaded by clicking on the upload locations. After selecting the destination the display route will display the route from the prescribed source to the destination. The passenger and the driver destination route is shown in the figure below

 

Fig. 2. Passenger destination route

 

Fig. 3. Driver destination route

 

Alternate Route:

The passenger after uploading the rides, a notification will be sent to the riders about the route information. The suggested route will be displayed for the rider as requested by the passenger. After accepting the request, the passenger details will be provided and the rider and the passenger can be communicated about the location and the time. The suggested route for the rider and the contact details of the passenger is shown below.

 

Fig. 4. Suggested route for rider

 

Fig. 5. Contact Details

 

CONCLUSION:

The system successfully outlines the usage and usefulness of carpooling and also makes it more attractive by enabling users to share their ride with their friends and relatives and restricts others. This feature encourages carpooling in less developed areas of the world where possession of a car is not very common. The model benefits from the social networking contacts derived from the user’s Gmail account, this can be further improvised to include other mail accounts like yahoo, Hotmail etc. Also social networking sites like Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn provide ample amount of data which can be used to identify college mates, colleagues, or even ex co-workers, or school friends. The system in future can also be configured to identify friends of friends who can be pooled and in turn leads to new friend suggestions. The benefits of the system are enormous with reduction in traffic, fuel economy, reduction in pollution etc. to further promote pooling payment system or redeemable points system can be implemented in the future.

 

FUTURE SCOPE:

Carpooling application is user friendly and reliable. Carpooling has a greater advantage to the community by reducing emissions and pollution thereby creating a better environment. Carpooling could be done by website, mobile app, call/SMS. If the user faces any issues, the support team will resolve the issue. There will be 24*7 supports for mobile application for help assistance to the users. Decreasing the fuel emissions will reduce global warming to a larger extent.

 

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Received on 27.07.2017                             Accepted on 08.09.2017

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