An online fastest-path recommender system

Abstract

This paper presents an online traffic system to recommend taxi drivers the fastest-path of picking passengers up. Several systems have been studied to find and recommend the shortest-paths on distance in mobile scenarios. However, in practical traffics, we discover that the shortest-path is usually not the fastest-path due to congestion. Especially for the taxi drivers, the fastest-path to pick up passengers is the best choice. Analyzing a real trace data including about 2000 taxis in a 22 square kilometers area in 7 days in Shanghai. Then we design a practical recommendation system to process the fastest-path selection. Experimental results show that our online system can quickly recommend the almost exact fastest-paths to taxi drivers for picking up passengers in real traces. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.