Pick-up tree based route recommendation from taxi trajectories

Abstract

Recommending suitable routes to taxi drivers for picking up passengers is helpful to raise their incomes and reduce the gasoline consumption. In this paper, a pick-up tree based route recommender system is proposed to minimize the traveling distance without carrying passengers for a given taxis set. Firstly, we apply clustering approach to the GPS trajectory data of a large number of taxis that indicates state variance from "free" to "occupied", and take the centroids as potential pick-up points. Secondly, we propose a heuristic based on skyline computation to construct a pick-up tree in which current position is its root node that connects all centroids. Then, we present a probability model to estimate gasoline consumption of every route. By adopting the estimated gasoline consumption as the weight of every route, the weighted Round-Robin recommendation method for the set of taxis is proposed. Our experimental results on real-world taxi trajectories data set have shown that the proposed recommendation method effectively reduce the driving distance before carrying passengers, especially when the number of cabs becomes large. Meanwhile, the time-cost of our method is also lower than the existing methods. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.