A persuasive real-time carpooling service in a smart city: A case-study to measure the advantages in urban area

Sustainable transport services are key for a smart city, especially when considering the increasing size of the population in major cities. In this context, carpooling solutions have gained more and more popularity in the last years. However, current implementations of carpooling services mostly rely on a “static” approach where users, which have planned future mid or long distance trips, post a message for sharing future planned rides. This approach is not suitable in urban areas where the users arrange with short notice a relatively short trip. This work addresses the relevant challenge and propose a novel service to assist the users to find the companion of the trip in a semi-automatic way. The CLACSOON platform is proposed and tested in simulated smart urban real-time scenario. An emulation system has been used to evaluate the performance of the resulting system. From extensive trials we have analyzed the quality of experience provided to the users varying the characteristics of the population. The result allowed for extracting important information about the challenges to be addressed for successful deployments of a real-time carpooling service.