Passenger scoring for free-pass promotion in public transportation

The focus of promotions targeted to increase the use of public transportation concentrates on increasing the attractiveness of it, particularly by decreasing transportation fares. To serve that purpose, this paper proposes a novel passenger scoring model, namely RFLT (recency, frequency, loyalty, and time), for offering a free-pass promotion in public transportation. It presents the comparison results of RFLT and wRFLT (weighted version) using a real-world dataset obtained by a near field communication (NFC) mobile payment application. The experimental results show that the w-RFLT model provides a more balanced score distribution than the RFLT model, and the frequency parameter (F), among four metrics (R, F, L, and T), influences the scoring results the most. The results of this study can be used to establish an efficient policy for increasing public transportation ridership.