A SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODEL FOR URBAN TAXI PRICE SIMULATION

Abstract

Urban taxi services have been developing year on year, playing an increasingly important role in the economy and the transportation markets of each city. This increases interest in measuring their performance. This paper analysed the relationship among the four stakeholders (including administrative department, operational companies, taxi drivers and customers) for urban taxi passenger transport system in China, and applied System Dynamics (SD) model to explore the dynamic characteristics of urban taxi price system. The main achievements of this paper are as follows, firstly, this paper adopted stakeholder mapping to describe the relationships among the four stakeholders. Then analysed the causal flow diagrams and the different variables of urban taxi passenger transport system operation, and presented the SD model, which considers factors that affect the taxi operation. With the combination of taxi operation data of Harbin city, we simulated eleven urban taxi operation scenarios and proposed kinds of suggestions to improve urban taxi passenger transport system operation, which can provide a good basis for recommending policy decisions for urban taxi market.