Optimizing Ride-Pooling Operations with Extended Pickup and Drop-Off Flexibility

The Ride-Pool Matching Problem (RMP) is central to on-demand ride-pooling services, where vehicles must be matched with multiple requests while adhering to service constraints such as pickup delays, detour limits, and vehicle capacity. Most existing RMP solutions assume passengers are picked up and dropped off at their original locations, neglecting the potential for passengers to walk to nearby spots to meet vehicles. This assumption restricts the optimization potential in ride-pooling operations. In this paper, we propose a novel matching method that incorporates extended pickup and drop-off areas for passengers. We first design a tree-based approach to efficiently generate feasible matches between passengers and vehicles. Next, we optimize vehicle routes to cover all designated pickup and drop-off locations while minimizing total travel distance. Finally, we employ dynamic assignment strategies to achieve optimal matching outcomes. Experiments on city-scale taxi datasets demonstrate that our method improves the number of served requests by up to 13% and average travel distance by up to 21% compared to leading existing solutions, underscoring the potential of leveraging passenger mobility to significantly enhance ride-pooling service efficiency.