Agent Based Modelling for Simulating Taxi Services

Taxi services account for a significant part of the daily trips in most of cities around the world. Due to the fact that most of the taxi markets are regulated by a central authority there is the need for developing tools for understanding the behavior of these markets to policy regulations and supporting decision makers. This paper presents an agent based model for simulating taxi services in urban areas. Taxi models presented in the literature can be grouped into aggregated, equilibrium and simulation models, with the latter having been studied to a lesser extent. Agent simulation is a powerful tool for analyzing such complex problems, where stochastic nature of the variables and spatial distribution hinders the application of aggregated models. The agent-based model is presented together with the behavioral rules of the agents and applied to the city of Barcelona, obtaining the optimum number of vehicles and performance indicators of the provision of taxi services under the dispatching operation mode.