In Seoul, elderly and handicapped people or women carrying babies cannot get taxi services easily, since most taxis are not operated with a call dispatching system. Recently, about 1500 «Mobum» taxis, which offer high quality services in Seoul, have adopted a call dispatching system with GPS, but still dispatched by dispatchers. This paper shows an automatic dispatching system applicable to the taxi operation with the automatic vehicle location system (AVL). The dispatching system adopts an heuristic vehicle assignment algorithm to which a linear programming model is applied. The system produces automatic assignments (routing) of empty taxis to the passengers who request services during the preset dispatching time period.
Abstract