Fundamental GI research, which is directly transferred to an application domain. The recently started project comm-unity is exactly about this.

Carployee is a young start-up company that is fully dedicated to sustainable commuting solutions. The core of Carployee’s portfolio is an app that facilitates the organisation of carpooling. Additionally, the carpooling is linked to incentive programs, which are provided by large companies and institutions to their employees. The coordination of supply (driver) and demand (passenger), the so-called matching, is a relatively complex optimization problem which is usually described as “traveling salesman problem” (TSP). Additionally, it is necessary to consider detour tolerance, time windows and capacities (number of available seats) in the optimization. This variant of the TSP is NP-hard. This means that the number of data points leads to too many possible combinations for conventional algorithms to be solved within reasonable time.

Z_GIS and Seibl IT supported Carployee in preparing a proposal for the FFG General Programme. In total, a budget of around € 650,000 could have been established. With this money, Carployee, together with Seibl IT and Z_GIS, is taking the matching process to a new level. In addition, Carployee is working on new functionalities of the app and developing them until they are ready for the market.

The aim of the scientific part of the project, in which Z_GIS is significantly involved, is to optimize an intermodal carpooling system, taking into account the spatial, organizational and economic conditions. With the help of geospatial analyses, the optimization problem described above is going to be partitioned into sub-problems. This step subsequently enables the development of efficient, heuristic algorithms for the matching of drivers and passengers. The first results are expected in mid-2021.

You can find all information about the project in our project gallery.