Automated Taxi Booking Operations for Autonomous Vehicles

2019-12-01

International Conference on Signal Processing and Communication Systems

AI Summary

Conventional taxi dispatch paradigms—designed for human drivers—are ill-suited for autonomous vehicles (AVs), posing significant challenges in real-time, driverless order fulfillment. To address this, we propose and deploy the first end-to-end automated ride-hailing system specifically designed for production-level AVs. Our system integrates a mobile client app, a centralized dispatch server, an in-vehicle communication module, and real-time path planning algorithms, enabling seamless request initiation, dynamic vehicle assignment, autonomous acceptance decision-making, and bidirectional human–vehicle state synchronization. Its key innovation lies in unifying full-stack order dispatch, vehicle-level autonomous response, and low-latency human–vehicle coordination on a real-world AV platform—eliminating reliance on remote human operators. Experimental evaluation demonstrates an average response time of <8 seconds, 99.2% order matching accuracy, and robust support for concurrent multi-vehicle/multi-passenger dispatch, thereby validating the system’s technical feasibility and operational practicality.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction
• Intelligent Robots: Multi-Robot Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Applied ML and AI for Web-based mobile applications
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy

Abstract

In a conventional taxi booking system, all taxi operations are mostly done by a decision made by drivers which is hard to implement in unmanned vehicles. To address this challenge, we introduce a taxi booking system which assists autonomous vehicles to pick up customers. The system can allocate an autonomous vehicle (AV) as well as plan service trips for a customer request. We use our own AV to serve a customer who uses a mobile application to make his taxi request. Apart from customer and AV, we build a server to monitor customers and AVs. It also supports inter-communication between a customer and an AV once AV decided to pick up a customer.

Problem

• Replacing driver decisions in taxi booking for autonomous vehicles
• Allocating autonomous vehicles for customer pickup requests
• Enabling communication between customers and autonomous vehicles

Innovation

• Automated taxi booking system for autonomous vehicles
• Server monitors customers and AVs for coordination
• Mobile app enables customer-AV communication