A management scheme for improving transportation efficiency and contributing to the enhancement of the social fabric

The continuously increasing need for mobility has brought about not only significant facilities in several aspects of human initiative, but also growing traffic congestions, a phenomenon that leads to unpleasant everyday situations at a short time level, but in the long run also to the degradation of the level of quality of living in large cities and the alienation between people. The management of traffic stands, thus, as a fundamental prerequisite for confronting those issues, enhancing transportation and improving the social fabric. This paper considers the concept of car pooling as a structured approach to this problem, by specifying, developing and validating a mobile-community-driven system for collaborative transportation, namely the “transportation management-car pooling system”. This system is capable of proposing optimal, reliable and secure community matches (taking into consideration personality features, talking interests, driving style, etc.), based on user profile and context information. The paper describes the transportation management-car pooling system, presenting its input parameters, decision making process and outcomes. Finally, indicative simulation results showcase its effectiveness.