Idea: Our project involves developing a model for predicting the travel time for a particular cab booking.
Such a model holds a lot of value for the consumers as well as the cab company. Many times customers
inquire the booking agents about the time it will take to travel from their source to destination but the
‘Cab sharing’ is a well known concept of public transport service that can enable people to use taxi services at low cost. Primarily this service is targeted to achieve two broad goals. One is availability of an economically viable cab service option to areas which are poorly serviced by public transport wherein the only other alternative would be a high cost cab service. Shared cabs could cater to those commuters who travel frequently on highly congested routes and often face difficulties because of unavailability of good transport facility.
Our client Yourcabs.com operates a platform to efficiently connect consumers in need of transport, with vendors in need of increased occupancy. Customers can make bookings through 3 possible methods- Online, Mobile website and phone. While traditionally most of the bookings have been coming from the phone method, the other 2 methods are fast catching up in terms of no of bookings being made. To maintain infrastructure to cater to a certain demand level in any of the booking methods, certain fixed and variable cost is incurred by our client.
Prof. Galit Shmueli, Institute of Service Science, College of Technology Management, National Tsing Hua University, 101 Kuang Fu Road Sec. 2, Hsinchu 30013 Taiwan
