Open AccessDynamic balance between demand-and-supply of urban taxis over trajectories
Author(s) -
Mingyang Li,
Junhao Han,
Yushan Mei,
Yuguang Li
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
mathematical biosciences and engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.451
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1551-0018
pISSN - 1547-1063
DOI - 10.3934/mbe.2022048
Subject(s) - taxis , computer science , merge (version control) , trip distribution , public transport , scalability , demand forecasting , computation , supply and demand , global positioning system , demand patterns , scheduling (production processes) , demand management , transport engineering , operations research , mathematical optimization , engineering , algorithm , economics , telecommunications , mathematics , macroeconomics , database , information retrieval , microeconomics
Urban taxi serves as an irreplaceable tool in public transportation systems. The balancing of demand-and-supply can be of significant social benefit, for which the equilibrium method for urban taxis, especially with dynamic trip demands, is not well studied yet. In this paper, we formally define the equilibrium problem and propose a coarse-grained dynamic balancing algorithm. It efficiently evaluates the trip demand distribution pattern and schedules supplies to more unbalanced regions. We first propose a density-based blocking algorithm to detect regions that are with more travel demands. A trip demand merging strategy is then proposed, which checks the correlation of trip demands to merge the trips into ones. To reduce the computation load, a lazy trip correlation strategy is devised to speed up the merging process. By calculating the defined balance factor, a scheduling algorithm is proposed to realize the trip merge and supply translocation based balancing approach. We evaluated our approach using a month of global positioning system (GPS) trajectories generated by 13,000 taxis of Shanghai. By learning the spatiotemporal distribution of historical taxi demand-and-supplies, we simulated an inflated trip demand platform. Tested on this platform with extensive experiments, the proposed approach demonstrates its effectiveness and scalability.