Careem: A car within 15 minutes

Background: Careem FFZ Ltd is a technology startup within the ground transportation industry based in Dubai, U.A.E, initially focusing on the chauffeur driven personal transport segment. In an industry with a fairly low utilization rate and poor customer experience overall the company aims at setting a new benchmark for customer service. Being a first mover on the market with an on-demand smartphone enabled booking service aims at overcoming many of these deficiencies. Purpose: A key success factor to a high customer satisfaction and a broad market penetration is to minimize the lead-time from a point of booking until the car arrives. The main purpose of this thesis has been to analyze the problem and establish models and tools to make sure this goal is fulfilled. Ultimately this has been an issue of matching demand and supply efficiently. Theory: The theoretical framework used has centered on clustering analysis to analyze the geographical scope of the demand. Time series models such as autoregressive AR, ARMA and neural networks models in an attempt to develop prediction models for the intensity scope of the demand. Results: The results produced have been encouraging but have also witnessed of the complexity of the problem. Regarding the geographical scope the clustering analysis proved a good tool to pinpoint where the demand appears. Out of the time series models applied only the AR model produced satisfactorily results but quite surprisingly a 4-week average model well. 12 By implementation of this prediction model as input to a separate supply model developed Careem now have a datadriven model for real-time decision-making.