A taxi dispatch system based on prediction of demand and destination

In this paper we describe an intelligent taxi dispatch system that has the goal of reducing the waiting time of the passengers and the idle driving distance of the taxis. The system relies on two separate models that predict the probability distributions of the taxi demand and destinations respectively. The models are learned from historical data and use a combination of long short term memory cells and mixture density networks. Using these predictors, taxi dispatch is formulated as a mixed integer programming problem. We validate the performance of the predictors and the overall system on a real world dataset of taxi trips in New York City. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.