A cost-effective recommender system for taxi drivers

The GPS technology and new forms of urban geography have changed the paradigm for mobile services. As such, the abundant availability of GPS traces has enabled new ways of doing taxi business. Indeed, recent efforts have been made on developing mobile recommender systems for taxi drivers using Taxi GPS traces. These systems can recommend a sequence of pick-up points for the purpose of maximizing the probability of identifying a customer with the shortest driving distance. However, in the real world, the income of taxi drivers is strongly correlated with the effective driving hours. In other words, it is more critical for taxi drivers to know the actual driving routes to minimize the driving time before finding a customer. To this end, in this paper, we propose to develop a cost-effective recommender system for taxi drivers. The design goal is to maximize their profits when following the recommended routes for finding passengers. Specifically, we first design a net profit objective function for evaluating the potential profits of the driving routes. Then, we develop a graph representation of road networks by mining the historical taxi GPS traces and provide a Brute-Force strategy to generate optimal driving route for recommendation. However, a critical challenge along this line is the high computational cost of the graph based approach. Therefore, we develop a novel recursion strategy based on the special form of the net profit function for searching optimal candidate routes efficiently. Particularly, instead of recommending a sequence of pick-up points and letting the driver decide how to get to those points, our recommender system is capable of providing an entire driving route, and the drivers are able to find a customer for the largest potential profit by following the recommendations. This makes our recommender system more practical and profitable than other existing recommender systems. Finally, we carry out extensive experiments on a real-world data set collected from the San Francisco Bay area and the experimental results clearly validate the effectiveness of the proposed recommender system.