Development of an intelligent location-based real-time taxi booking system

Abstract

With the emergence and increasing development of 4G mobile networks in Singapore, more and more people have enjoyed the benefits brought by such network including a faster internet browsing speed, a better internet connection and most importantly a variety of mobile applications that are supported by this highly developed mobile network. Over the last decade, Singapore’s taxi industry has thrived under a stable economic growth and a highly developed transportation network. As the demand for taxi service increases, another observation shows that there has been increasing amount of time spent on waiting taxis despite the fact that the growth of taxi population is in fact larger than the growth of ridership.

Through this project, a mobile application that improves the efficiency of allocation of available taxis to needed passengers was designed and tested. With the implementation of this mobile application, it aims to provide greater convenience to both passengers and taxi drivers by reducing the waiting time for passengers and the searching time for taxi drivers. The application also offer an attractive feature for passengers to share a ride with others to lower the high cost of transportation, at the same time, alleviates the congestion problem in Singapore. This mobile application was programmed using open-source software Android OS. It was designed to be highly user friendly with different features to further enhance the user experience of the application.