An Analysis of the Taxi-Sharing Organizing and Pricing

Abstract

At present, the supply of taxi service is larger than the demand in many cities, particularly in mage cities. Increasing the quantity of taxi is an unsustainable method, which will aggravate the congestion and damage the environment. Therefore, in order to solve this tricky problem, we encourage passengers who have the taxi trip demand to share taxi with others. Taxi sharing has the broad prospect, but it has not been paid enough attention. Studies show that the researches of the taxi-sharing organizing (including the taxi-sharing matching and the route choice) and the pricing method are not mature and deeply. Hence, in terms of their important functions to promote the taxi sharing, this paper focuses on two aspects: the taxi-sharing organizing model and the pricing method. Firstly, we establish a based taxi-sharing organizing (the matching and route choice) model. Its objective function is to minimize the number of service vehicles and minimize the total travel distance. Furthermore, in order to overcome the limitations of the based model, we establish an improved taxi-sharing organizing (the matching and route choice) model. Its objective functions are to minimize the number of service vehicles and maximize the overlapped travel distance. This improved model can fulfill the system optimization further. Secondly, the fair fare allocation is raised. The order to pay, the number of sharing passengers, the travel distance, and the waiting time are considered, respectively. Furthermore, based on the fair fare allocation, we proposed a generalized taxi-sharing pricing method. Finally, in the viewpoint of companies/agents, drivers, and passengers, we make some suggestions to put the above two models/methods into practice and promote the taxi sharing.