Designing a multimodal generalised ride sharing system

In the last few decades, the rapid evolution of information and communication technologies has promoted new methods for mobility planning. In the meanwhile, beyond the performance and sustainability enhancement of transportation systems, the promotion of the modal shift from private vehicles towards more sustainable modes still remains major target of transportation systems management, especially in urban areas. In this framework, car sharing and ride sharing appear to be two of the most promising approaches for reducing the number of circulating cars, but their performances are usually optimised separately. Then, the aim of this work is to introduce a generalised ride sharing system consisting of an integrated multimodal transport system which virtualises already available different modes allowing users to schedule multimodal trips in a single task. In doing so, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated by means of a real-world case study.