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I am writing my Bachelor thesis about a Dynamic Carpooling service. It uses air-to-air distances, as I could not find resources to have a system using maps and routings.

I am interested to know if there already exists an algorithm that does the same as mine.
I know that my algorithm is very simple. I just would like to know if I have re-invented the wheel for avoiding to look like an ass in my thesis.

The full pseudocode can be found on my website.

Here is a brief summary of the pseudocode, human readable:

given the rider position and its destination:

  1. get from database all active trips with a destination contained in a small geo-box centered in the rider destination.
  2. From the retrieven trips, exclude those in which the driver is closer than the rider to the destination
  3. From the remaining trips, exclude those in which the driver tends to move away from the rider
  4. Return the trips

Some words about point 3: for calculating the "proximity factor" of the driver, I get the last N positions (let's say 10) of the driver while he's driving. I compute the distance from those positions to the position of the rider. I then check how many times this set of distances tends to decrease (ie, to get closer to the rider). If this "number of times", called proximity factor, is more than a given tollerance, I assume that the driver is getting closer to the rider.

Thank you very much for your responses.