Application of tabu search method in solving a taxi-sharing problem

Nowadays, a ride-sharing system is a trend among society for traveling. The ride-sharing system is a solution that can be developed to reduce the congestion because of the high amounts of the vehicle on the road. Taxi as an alternative transportation in an urban area can impose the ride-sharing system. Taxi-sharing aims to maximize the utilization of taxi capacity, thereby reduces the fare for passengers, increases the income for taxi operator, and reduces congestion, gas emission, as well as fuel consumption. In order to maximize the benefits of the taxi-sharing system usage, we need to optimize taxi routes and match requests that share taxi service. In this paper, we used a mixed integer programming problem as in Hosni et al (2014) to make a model of optimization of the taxi-sharing problem, then solved the problem by using a tabu search method. The experiments showed that the tabu search method could increase the income of taxi operator up to 10 - 14 %.