A novel approach to independent taxi scheduling problem based on stable matching

Abstract

This paper describes a taxi scheduling system, which aims to improve the overall efficiency of the system, both from the perspective of the drivers and the customers. This is of particular relevance to Chinese cities, where hailing a taxi on the street is by far the most common way in which taxis are requested, since the majority of taxi drivers operate independently, rather than working for a company. The mobile phone and Global Positioning System-based taxi scheduling system, which is described in this paper, aims to provide a decision support system for taxi drivers and facilitates direct information exchange between taxi drivers and passengers, while allowing drivers to remain independent. The taxi scheduling problem is considered to be a non-cooperative game between taxi drivers and a description of this problem is given. We adopt an efficient algorithm to discover a Nash equilibrium, such that each taxi driver and passenger cannot benefit from changing their assigned partner. Two computational examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.