Towards An Automated Multiagent Taxi-Dispatch System

This paper presents the study of a novel approach towards an automated taxi dispatch system that handles current bookings in a distributed fashion. Existing systems in use by taxi operators in Singapore attempt 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, we propose a multiagent architecture, populated with software collaborative agents that can actively negotiate on behalf of taxi drivers in groups of size N for available customer bookings. The operational efficiency of the existing and proposed dispatch systems was evaluated through computer simulations on MITSIMLab, an existing simulation-based laboratory originally developed for evaluating traffic management system designs at the operational level. The empirical results, obtained for a 1000-strong taxi fleet over a discrete range of N, show that the proposed system can dispatch taxis with up to 33.1% and 26.3% reduction in customer waiting time and empty taxi cruising time, respectively.