Taxi is an important class of public transportation that provides convenience and flexibility levels close to that of car ownership. Unfortunately, taxi services are also very inefficient (50% idling time is quite common for a typical taxi fleet) since significant fraction of taxi services is delivered by roaming on the street. This inefficiency is most evident when large amount of demands suddenly emerge in a small area. Taxi service providers are usually slow in adjusting to this type of surge, and this results in unnecessary waiting on both driver-side and rider-side and greatly hurts operational efficiency.

In this project, we would address the issue of taxi service and demand mismatches in an urban environment. We will first develop the behavioral model for taxi drivers near the point of demand surge, and based on this model, we plan to propose practical mechanisms the could help to improve the quality of service (QoS) for the studied taxi fleet. All our studies will be based on the real-world data.

• Develop technique for processing and analyzing noisy real-world data.
• Modeling driver's queueing behaviors.
• Propose and test mechanism that would improve taxi fleet efficiency.

• Shih-Fen Cheng, Duc Thien Nguyen, and Hoong Chuin Lau. A mechanism for organizing last-mile service using non-dedicated fleet, 2012 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT-12), to appear, Macau, December 2012.
• Asrar Ahmed, Pradeep Varakantham, and Shih-Fen Cheng. Uncertain congestion games with assorted human agent populations, 28th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-12), to appear, California, USA, August 2012.
• Pradeep Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng, Geoff Gordon, and Asrar Ahmed. Decision support for agent populations in uncertain and congested environments, 26th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12), pages 1471-1477, Toronto, Canada, July 2012.
• Shih-Fen Cheng and Thi Duong Nguyen. TaxiSim: A multiagent simulation platform for evaluating taxi fleet operations, 2011 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT-11), pages 14-21, Lyon, France, August 2011.
• Pradeep Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng and Thi Duong Nguyen. Decentralized Decision Support for an agent population in dynamic and uncertain domains, Tenth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS-11), pages 1147-1148, Taipei, Taiwan, May 2011.
• Shih-Fen Cheng and Xin Qu. A service choice model for optimizing taxi service delivery, 12th International IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC-09), pages 66-71, St. Louis, MO, October 2009.
• Shih-Fen Cheng, Darshan Santani, and Jason Woodard. Optimal routing policy for taxi queuing, INFORMS Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, October 2008.

• Density clustering technique for noisy and low-resolution spatio-temporal data (with Dongchang Liu), working paper, 2011.