T-PickSeer: visual analysis of taxi pick-up point selection behavior

Abstract

Taxi drivers often take much time to navigate the streets to look for passengers, which leads to high vacancy rates and wasted resources. Empty taxi cruising remains a big concern for taxi companies. Analyzing the pick-up point selection behavior can solve this problem effectively, providing suggestions for taxi management and dispatch. Many studies have been devoted to analyzing and recommending hotspot regions of pick-up points, which can make it easier for drivers to pick-up passengers. However, the selection of pick-up points is complex and affected by multiple factors, such as convenience and traffic management. Most existing approaches cannot produce satisfactory results in real-world applications because of the changing travel demands and the lack of interpretability. In this paper, we introduce a visual analytics system, T-PickSeer, for taxi company analysts to better explore and understand the pick-up point selection behavior of passengers. We explore massive taxi GPS data and employ an overview-to-detail approach to enable effective analysis of pick-up point selection. Our system provides coordinated views to compare different regularities and characteristics in different regions. Also, our system assists in identifying potential pick-up points and checking the performance of each pick-up point. Three case studies based on a real-world dataset and interviews with experts have demonstrated the effectiveness of our system.

Graphic abstract