PDPTW Based Taxi Dispatch Modeling for Booking Service

This research involves a study of the existing taxi dispatch system employed by taxi operators in Singapore. Based on the booking surcharges, there are generally two categories of taxi bookings, current and advance. Current bookings are requests that taxi should reach the customer immediately or within half an hour, and advance bookings are requests made at least half an hour in advance. In this paper, a novel trip-chaining strategy for taxi advance booking based on a customized algorithm of Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Window (PDPTW) was proposed. The idea is to chain several bookings with demand time points which are spread out within a reasonable period of time, and with each pick-up point coinciding with or being within close proximity to the previous drop-off location. Based on the experimental results, the proposed system has the potential to improve the taxi booking service currently operating in Singapore.