A new model for the movement pattern of vacant taxi

Abstract

With the taxi playing an increasingly important role in the lives of people, we need further develop the understanding of taxi behavior to analyze the movement pattern of population and improve various intelligent transportation systems. Our work focus on building a new model for the vacant taxi movement pattern in town center of Beijing and we make contribution in three ways. Firstly, through studying foraging behavior of wild animals, we establish the model combined with Lévy flight and exponential distribution. The simulation result is approximate to actual data we collected. Secondly, unlike previous models, we add the time dimension into our model and show the time function of all parameters. Finally, we explain the physical significance and conversion relation of parameters in our model. With these relationship, we can calculate parameters by some small items of data, not the whole database.