Study of the operation of taxi cars in an emergency situation

Abstract

This paper examines the transportation work of taxi companies operating in the city of Ruse in an emergency situation caused by the COVID-19 epidemic when the number of requests for taxis decreased by 60%, about 30% of drivers stopped working due to reduced workload. The aim of the present study is to identify changes in their work intensity. The taxi operating system is modelled as a queuing system with failures with non-stationary incoming flow of requests and a variable number of service channels. After collecting and processing statistical information about the received requests, the incoming flow is modelled as a periodic nonlinear function. The main parameters of the study are: density of failures, average number of taxi cars occupied per day and intensity of serviced requests. The object of the study is a full working day of 24 working hours, taking into account the reduced intensity of transportation work. Even at the highest peaks the load coefficient is below 0.1, which means that in the intervals with the highest load, the service occupancy is below 10% of those working at the moment. In the interval from 0:00 h to 7:00 h a load factor slightly above 0.04 is observed. An application has been created in the environment of MATLAB.