Data-driven Collaborative Transportation

目前，汽车没有得到充分利用。首先，大多数汽车90%以上的时间都停在停车位上。其次，即使是正在使用的汽车也没有得到充分利用，因为相对于可用的座位数量，它们的入住率很低。为了享受可靠、安全和按需的交通，必须容忍这种对交通和停车资源的低效利用。然而，今天，互联网连接的设备让我们从汽车拥有模式转向共享交通模式。因此，越来越多的人从私家车转向公共交通、按需出租车（Uber、BlaBlaCar）和按需共享汽车（Car2go）。汽车共享指的是像Car2Go这样的服务，即多名乘客依次使用同一辆车。拼车指的是UberPool和Blablacar等服务，在这些服务中，多名乘客在行程的重叠部分同时使用同一辆车。政府政策的变化和电动汽车正在解决汽车排放的污染问题。未来自动驾驶汽车的目标是通过汽车共享来增加车辆的使用率，从而减少停车场闲置车辆的数量。然而，无论是电动汽车还是自动驾驶汽车，都无法减少道路上行驶的汽车数量和由此造成的拥堵延误。Discovery项目旨在利用联网设备（车辆和智能手机）的实时数据和实时优化来做出拼车和路线决策，从而通过拼车减少道路拥堵。事实上，自动驾驶汽车的出现可能会让拼车服务变得更容易获得。

Currently, cars are vastly underutilized. Firstly, most cars sit in parking spaces over ninety percent of the time. Secondly, even cars that are in use are underused due to their low occupancy relative to the number of seats available. This inefficient use of transportation and parking resources had to be tolerated to enjoy reliable, safe, and on-demand transportation. Today, however, Internet-connected devices allow us to move away from the car-ownership paradigm toward a shared transportation paradigm. Hence, more and more people are moving away from car-ownership to embrace public transportation, on-demand taxis (Uber, BlaBlaCar), and on-demand carsharing (Car2go). Carsharing refers to services like Car2Go, where multiple travelers use the same vehicle sequentially. Ridesharing refers to services such as UberPool and Blablacar, where multiple riders share the same vehicle concurrently on overlapping portions of their trips. Government policy-changes and electric vehicles are tackling the problems of pollution from vehicle emissions. Future autonomous vehicles aim to reduce the number of idle vehicles in parking lots by increasing their usage through carsharing. However, neither electric vehicles nor autonomous vehicles can reduce the number of cars traveling on roads and the resulting congestion delays. This Discovery program aims to reduce road congestion through ridesharing by using real-time data from Internet-connected devices (vehicles and smartphones) and real-time optimization to make ridesharing and routing decisions. In fact, the advent of autonomous vehicles will likely make ridesharing services even more accessible.