WORLD CITIES SUMMIT 2022

Taxi Driver Guidance System: Helping Taxi Drivers Compete Against Ride-Hailing Technologies

The DGS technology is expected to increase the number of trips by at least 10%, reduce empty cruising time for guided drivers and improve the driver’s income.

Overview

Traditional taxi companies have been slow in responding to challenges posed by ride-hailing services. The development of Driver Guidance System (DGS) technology aims to help taxi drivers compete against these technologies by providing guidance to an area with predicted demand that would help drivers shorten their empty cruising time before finding the next passenger.

Features

The DGS smartphone app is designed to be hands-free and will automatically provide the best recommendations for individual drivers depending on their respective locations.

The key enabling technology behind the development of the DGS is the stream data processing, demand prediction, and driver-sensitive decision support system.

The taxi driver guidance system is designed to assist taxi drivers in making decisions regarding where to roam in a city in order to maximise their chances in picking up potential passengers.

It is designed to balance taxi demand and supply dynamically, and reduce empty taxi cruising time. This is achieved through the application of real-time taxi analytics to anticipate where demands would most likely be, and providing guidance to drivers on where to go.

An important technical innovation of the DGS technology is its ability in generating personalised recommendations for hundreds or even thousands of drivers. These personalisations are achieved by considering the status of all taxis and the demand occurrences in real-time.

The Driver Guidance System provides recommendation at 3 levels – zone, region and street.

Benefits

The DGS technology aims to help taxi drivers compete against ride-hailing technologies by providing driver-specific guidance on which region and roads to roam in order to improve the driver’s income.

It can be applied to the transport industry – taxi drivers, fleet operators, transport agencies – to improve driver income level and passenger service level.

The DGS technology is expected to increase the number of trips by at least 10%, and reduce empty cruising time for guided drivers.

Lead Researcher: Assoc Prof Cheng Shih-Fen (SMU School of Computing and Information Systems)

Read more about the DGS technology here .

This study was featured at SMU’s booth at the World Cities Summit 2022 exhibition.