The Impact of Fleet Coordination on Taxi Operations

Abstract

On-demand mobility has existed for more than 100 years in the form of taxi systems. Comparatively recently, ride-hailing schemes have also grown to a significant mode share. Most types of such one-way mobility-on-demand systems allow drivers taking independent decisions. These systems are not or only partially coordinated. In a different operating mode, all decisions are coordinated by the operator, allowing for the optimization of certain metrics. Such a coordinated operation is also implied if human-driven vehicles are replaced by self-driving cars. This work quantifies the service quality and efficiency improvements resulting from the coordination of taxi fleets. Results based on high-fidelity transportation simulations and data sets of existing taxi systems are presented for the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and Zurich. They show that fleet coordination can strongly improve the efficiency and service level of existing systems. Depending on the operator and the city’s preferences, empty vehicle distance driven and fleet sizes could be substantially reduced, or the wait times could be reduced while maintaining the current fleet sizes. The study provides clear evidence that full fleet coordination should be implemented in existing mobility-on-demand systems, even before the availability of self-driving cars.

A Predictive Fleet Management Strategy for On-Demand Mobility Services: A Case Study in Munich

“…Ruch et al [22] presented a comparison of different fleet operating strategies [12,23,24] applied to real-world use cases in Chicago, San Francisco, and Zurich. To ensure comparability with real-world conditions, they developed an algorithm to estimate traffic flow based on taxi trip metrics.…”

“…This research issue was in line with the goal of this study: to improve the current taxi dispatch system by taking demand predictions into account. [21][22][23][24]31] presented various fleet management methods for large-scale real-world scenarios in San Francisco, Chicago, and Zurich. Since the way the taxi business works differs greatly from place to place, our study contributed a new real-world scenario of a representative German city to render the results globally comparable.…”