Simulation study on impacts of vacant taxi behavior on system performance

A taxi operation system in our country possesses the following features:1)vacant taxis cruise the streets looking for passengers,and the vacant taxis behavior exerts great influence on sys- tem performance; 2)it is quite common that taxis may pick up passengers anywhere on roadside. Thus a discrete event system simulation model for cruising taxis is proposed in this paper.The dy- namic processes of taxis searching for passengers and providing travel services are simulated,and the impacts of the search strategies on system performance are quantitatively analyzed.Through a simu- lation experiment,it is shown that strategies based on history information can help to raise system ef- ficiency,and cruising taxis can not benefit from equipping a radio dispatch system.This study is helpful to taxi operators for raising their vacant taxi efficiency and to urban transportation department for providing better services.