Although ridesharing can provide a wealth of benefits, such as reduced travel costs, congestion, and consequently less pollution, there are a number of challenges that have restricted its widespread adoption. In fact, even at a time when improving communication systems provide real-time detailed information that could be used to facilitate ridesharing, the share of work trips that use ridesharing has decreased by almost 10% in the past 30 years. In this seminar, Dr. Dessouky presents a classification and taxonomy to understand the key aspects of ridesharing systems and models to facilitate their wide-spread use. The objective is to present a framework that can help identify key challenges in the widespread use of ridesharing and thus foster the development of effective formal ridesharing mechanisms that would overcome these challenges and promote its wide spread use.
Maged M. Dessouky is Tryon Chair in Industrial and Systems Engineering and Professor and Chair in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His research area is transportation system optimization where he has authored over 115 refereed publications. His paper “Optimal Slack Time for Schedule Based Transit Operations” was awarded the INFORMS Transportation Science and Logistics Best Paper Prize. He is a Fellow of IISE and INFORMS and serves as Associate Director of METRANS, a center focused on solving important urban transportation problems. He is currently associate editor of Transportation Research Part B: Methodological and on the editorial board of Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, and previously served as area editor of the ACM Transactions of Modeling and Computer Simulation, department editor of IISE Transactions, area editor of Computers and Industrial Engineering, and associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems. He has won numerous teaching awards including USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching. He received his Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, and M.S. and B.S. degrees from Purdue University.