A Multi-Agent Taxi Dispatching System

The taxi assignment problem may be categorized as a vehicle routing problem. ‎ When placed in the field of resource allocation, it is a dynamic problem in which ‎ the situation changes as the work progresses. This paper presents a new agent-based approach to tackle the taxi assignment problem. New parameters are ‎ introduced to increase the satisfaction of the drivers. The authors propose a new algorithm to improve the parameters. Simulations were also conducted to examine the efficiency of the proposed method. The results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed taxi assignment/dispatching approach. DOI: 10.4018/jats.2010040101 2 International Journal of Agent Technologies and Systems, 2(2), 1-10, April-June 2010 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. ‎an algorithm that considers and improves their satisfaction explicitly. The remainder of this article is structured as follows. In section 2, we discuss the definition of the problem. This section discusses the current situation followed by an analysis of requirements of a better taxi dispatching system. Section 3 presents the proposed multi-agent dispatching system. This section goes on by describing the simulator we used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. In section 4, we analyze the simulation results and compare the proposed multi-agent dispatching algorithm with current dispatching methods. This section starts with a definition of the parameters we used in this analysis, then goes on by comparing different dispatching methods using these parameters.