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摘要
This paper presents a novel multiagent approach to automating taxi dispatch that services current bookings in a distributed fashion. The existing system in use by a taxi operator in Singapore and elsewhere, attempts to increase customer satisfaction locally, by sequentially dispatching nearby taxis to service customers. The proposed dispatch system attempts to increase customer satisfaction more globally, by concurrently dispatching multiple taxis to the same number of customers in the same geographical region, and vis-a-vis human driver satisfaction. To realize the system, a multiagent architecture is proposed, populated with software collaborative agents that can actively negotiate on behalf of taxi drivers in groups of size for available customer bookings. Theoretically, an analysis of the boundary and optimal multiagent taxi-dispatch situations is presented along with a discussion of their implications. Experimentally, the operational efficiency of the existing and proposed dispatch systems was evaluated through computer simulations. The empirical results, obtained for a 1000-strong taxi fleet over a discrete range of, show that the proposed system can dispatch taxis with reduction in customer waiting and empty taxi cruising times of up to 33.1% and 26.3%, respectively; and up to 41.8% and 41.2% reduction when a simple negotiation speedup heuristic was applied. Note to Practitioners-With the liberalization of the taxi industry in Singapore and elsewhere, keener competition among taxi operators has emerged. We believe the taxi operator that leads the competition will be the one with the best automated taxi dispatch system, offering the highest cost productivity and customer satisfaction. Our research is motivated by the increasing need for better automated approaches to match customer service requests and taxis, whose arrival and availability, respectively, might be sporadic or not known a priori. In this paper, we propose a novel multiagent system, called TuCab dispatch, to automate taxi dispatch in a distributed fashion. Our experiments for a 1000-strong taxi fleet show that TuCab dispatch can outperform existing centralized dispatch in terms of reduction in customer waiting and empty taxi cruising times, when both leverage on real-time traffic information for shortest-time path computation over a road network as proposed (Lee et al., 2004). Additionally, TuCab dispatch can be implemented on an existing technological infrastructure, providing the opportunities to harness the existing power of multiple intelligent transportation systems technologies. A more efficient dispatch system can help maintain a higher standard of customer service vis-a-vis human driver satisfaction, especially when the demand for taxi service is manageable for the fleet size. In future research, we will need to add more features and investigate their effectiveness towards achieving overall efficiency, including techniques to influence and better match the physical distributivity between service demand and available taxi supply in real-time.
- 出版日期2010-7
