ForETaxi: Data-Driven Fleet-Oriented Charging Resource Allocation in Large-Scale Electric Taxi Networks

Charging processes are the key to promoting electric taxis and improving their operational efficiency due to frequent charging activities and long charging time. Nevertheless, optimizing charging resource allocation in real time is extremely challenging because of uneven charging demand/supply distributions, heuristic-based charging behaviors of drivers, and city-scale of the fleets. The existing solutions have utilized real-time contextual information for charging recommendation, but they do not consider themuch-richer fleet information, leading to the suboptimal individual-based charging recommendation. In this paper, we design a data-driven fleet-oriented charging recommendation system for charging resource allocation called ForETaxi for electric taxis, which aims to minimize the overall charging overhead for the entire fleet, instead of individual vehicles. ForETaxi considers not only current charging requests but also possible charging requests of other nearby electric taxis in the near future by inferring their status in real time. More importantly, we implement ForETaxi with multiple types of sensor data from the Chinese Shenzhen city including GPS data, and taxi transaction data from more than 13,000 electric taxis, combined with road network data and charging station data. The data-driven evaluation results show that compared to the state-of-the-art individual-based recommendation methods, our fleet-oriented ForETaxi outperforms them by 16% in the total charging time reduction and 82% in the queuing time reduction.