An Optimal Profit Route Planning Scheme Based on ACO-OPP

Taxi plays an important role of urban public transportation system. However, without appropriate route planning scheme, taxi drivers can only choose to wait or seek passengers in the absence of orders, leading to wasting a lot of time and fuel. In this paper, an optimal profit route planning scheme for taxi drivers with Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm based on Optimal Profit Points (ACO-OPP) is proposed. First, the taxi trajectory data are preprocessed and the pick-up and drop-off points are extracted to obtain high-quality data; second, the data spatiotemporal distribution is analyzed to plan a more appropriate and rational route; the clustering algorithm is used to obtain the optimal profit points to increase the occupancy rate of taxis; then, ACO-OPP is utilized to plan the profit routes for each taxi. A series of experiments are implemented based on the real taxi trajectory dataset to test and compare the performance of the simulated annealing algorithm, the genetic algorithm, the ant colony algorithm and ACO-OPP on the optimal route length and the profitability with the unit time profit function. The experimental results show that ACO-OPP has the shortest optimal route length and the best profit per unit time.