A fantastic solution
Challenge
The project had to solve 3 main challenges.
The high concentration of taxis in and around the airport when demand did not match, the sometimes low level of service to customers at the airport, and the violations of taxi laws that occurred daily with customers witnessing this.
To accommodate the drivers and reduce their waiting time, there is a target in the system that a taxi should wait a maximum of 20 min. on average per year per trip from the airport. The system also regulates this itself if desired.
Approach
Solution
To overcome the challenges, it was necessary to limit the taxis' access to the airport so that they arrived just before the need for a taxi arose. This was solved with a forecast-based system that called taxis every 90 seconds according to the forecast. The system was and is self-regulating against the forecast, so an incorrect forecast is corrected by the system itself.
The service level challenge was solved by accessing the taxi companies' own app, where taxi customers rated the rides, and CPH decided that only drivers with a score of min. 4.8 out of 6.0 were only allowed to drive trips from the airport.
The introduction of a catalogue of sanctions, which excluded a taxi and driver from taking trips from the airport for a given period of time (depending on the severity of the offense), made it possible to behaviorally regulate that part of the challenge.
Not least, the green initiatives have been expanded to include benefits for electric taxis, the possibility to recycle taxis that drop off customers at the airport, as well as some technical adjustments requested by the taxi companies that allow them to utilize their fleet even more efficiently for the benefit of the environment.
The airport doesn't experience the massive concentration of taxis anymore. Now, supply and demand match almost 100% and customers have not experienced a longer waiting time for a taxi. On the contrary, the waiting time for a taxi is very low and 99% of the time under 4 minutes.
The service level has also been raised to a score of around 5 out of 6 and the number of service complaints has dropped to very few over a full calendar year.
The introduction of the sanctions catalog in the solution has reduced the number of violations from approximately 1 per taxi registered with TMS in 2015 to 0.20 per taxi in 2019.
