Innovative customer forecasting system with 32% savings in Taxi operational costs

Project Information

Smartaxi

Grant agreement ID: 745002

DOI

10.3030/745002

Project closed

EC signature date 19 November 2016

Start date 1 December 2016

End date 30 April 2017

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Smart, Green And Integrated Transport

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

TALLER INNOVACION ABIERTA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Smartaxi (Innovative customer forecasting system with 32% savings in Taxi operational costs)

Reporting period: 2016-12-01 to 2017-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In Europe, there are more than one million taxis, which represents 10-20% of urban traffic in major cities. On average, taxis drive more than 80.000 kilometres per year, mostly in inner-city areas.
Although, the taxi industry is significant to the European economy, it is comprised of an inefficient system. Taxis spend 50% of their time circulating without customers or searching for demand. Consequently, this leads to a reduction of revenue for the taxi industry, increasing traffic in urban areas and thus, increasing the possibility of traffic accidents, as well as increased environmental pollution, which impacts the wellbeing of the citizens.
Smartaxi tackles the issues taxi drivers face, daily. It increases efficiency by 32% by reducing the driving time without customers, through a system that will modify the taxi management procedures worldwide. Smartaxi is an innovative platform, which transforms the method of searching for customers. It integrates an intelligent software to provide a reliable forecast of customer demand, which supposes a 32% savings in taxi operation costs. In addition, it reduces 3,5 M Tons of CO2 in Europe.
Thus, implementing Smartaxi will provide a friendly user technology, which will have a significant impact on saving time and oil, as well as improving the urban transportation system

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the Phase I different activities have been developed. First of all, a technical feasibility study with two objectives. Optimize the statistical models of the predictive system and make a friendlier App.
In one hand the optimization of the models has been accomplished increasing the adaptation speed of the models to a certain city by a 18% maintaining the previous accuracy, and in the other hand by field research some new updates has been implemented such as new designs in the statistics graphs, the possibility of eliminate the need of tapping in the smartphone the race start and end by installing in the taxi a device that let the App know when this happens and new rules for increasing the ‘Karma’ (percentage of the city that is visible to you by sharing information in the free version).
A business plan for internationalize Smartaxi has been made with a deep analysis of the possible competitors. Key partners have been located and studied, being the next step a first contact to weight new opportunities of deployment.
A market analysis of 10 European cities has been made, the cities are City of London, Madrid, Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Berlin, Roma, Hamburg, Milan and Dublin. Other analysis has been made as context, legislation and number of licenses analysis upon these cities. For last a field research study is being done.
A bottle neck has been found in deploying Smartaxi by the hand of a public administration, still action plans have been developed in order to take a long term deployment in those cases. A selling quantification from 2019 to 2022 has been developed.
The FTO analysis based in the patents and the significative differences of the projects with Smartaxi has been performed.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Smartaxi has been developed to eliminate the blindness of taxi drivers regarding where is the demand at every moment, with a lack of information taxi drivers must trusts their instincts at all time, what is not always precise and sometimes special events can be missed. Going beyond creating a channel from taxi driver to client, Smartaxi goes ahead to the need of communication predicting where the demand is. This way taxi drivers don’t need to receive specific locations where to go but areas with high demand close to them, besides they don’t need to have the most popular taxi application in order to receive these calls, Smartaxi targets all possible clients among the city.
Smartaxi has its main impact in the earnings of the taxi drivers, with a 32% of reduction of the empty driving time a 16,7% of extra income is accomplished. Besides planning when to rest, when to continue driving or when to go to a certain taxi stop increases the overall comfort of the taxi driver during the work day.
An additional impact can be seen in the city and in citizen’s satisfaction. With an optimization of the taxi sector a reduction of pollution, traffic jams and even accidents is achieved, adding that cities go one step closer of becoming Smart Cities with the implementation of an automatic system that organizes and improves the taxi traffic management. Regarding citizen’s, their satisfaction with the taxi service and its reliability increases.

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