Towards efficient vacant taxis Cruising Guidance

Different from the conventional operation mode in existing taxi dispatch systems, in this paper, we envision a new cyber-technology enabled taxi dispatch system which can efficiently provide vacant taxis with cruising route suggestions, not to respond to any specific pick-up request but instead, hoping to find prospective customers (such system is also complementary to the conventional operation mode). We address the Taxi Cruising Guidance (TCG) problem with the objective being to minimize the Global Vacant Rate (GVR), which is defined as the ratio of traveling miles with no passenger onboard, to the total traveling miles in a given time period. We propose a number of heuristic solutions and conduct comprehensive performance evaluations based on large-scale simulations. A case study is also presented by utilizing real traces collected from taxis in the city of Shanghai. As part of our research, we leverage a well-known microscopic traffic simulator (called TRANSIMS) to demonstrate that the application of TCG is also beneficial to traffic management.