The rising car usage deriving from growth in jobs and residential population causes air
pollution, energy waste and consumption of people’s time. Public transport cannot be the
only answer to this increasing transport demand. Carpooling, which is based on the idea
that sets of car owners pick up colleagues while driving to or from the workplace, has
emerged to be a viable possibility for reducing private car usage in congested areas. Its
actual practice requires a suitable information system support and, the most important,
the capability of effectively solving the underlying combinatorial optimization problem.
This paper describes an ant colony algorithm based hybrid approach (HAC) for solving the
multi-destination carpooling problem. Experiments have been performed to confirm the
efficiency and the effectiveness of the approach.