Abstract

Recent advances in communication technology coupled with increasing environmental concerns, road congestion, and the high cost of vehicle ownership have directed more attention to the opportunity cost of empty seats traveling throughout the transportation networks every day. Peer-to-peer (P2P) ridesharing is a good way of using the existing passenger-movement capacity on the vehicles, thereby addressing the concerns about the increasing demand for transportation that is too costly to address via infrastructural expansion.This dissertation is dedicated to the optimization of the matching process between the participants in a ridesharing system. More specifically, focus of this dissertation is on multi-hop matching, in which riders have the possibility of transferring between vehicles. Different algorithms have been presented for various implementation strategies of ridesharing systems. Multiple case studies assess the important role ridesharing can play as a separate mode, or in conjunction with other modes of transportation, in multi-modal settings.