Large-scale microscopic simulation of taxi services. Berlin and Barcelona case studies

The paper presents research on large-scale microscopic simulation of taxi services in Berlin and Barcelona based on floating car data collected by local taxi fleets. Firstly, Berlin’s and Barcelona’s taxi markets are shortly described and the demand and supply data obtained from FCD analysed. Secondly, the online taxi dispatching problem formulation for this specific case is given, followed by the definition of two real-time rule-based heuristics used to dispatch taxis dynamically within the simulation. Finally, the simulation setup in MATSim is described, and the results obtained with both heuristics are analysed and compared in terms of dispatching performance, proving the effectiveness of the second strategy at different demand and supply scales. This paper is an extended version of Maciejewski and Bischoff 2015, where only the Berlin case study was presented.