We are seeing a splurt in the taxi aggregator industry. In Bangalore, there’s Meru Cabs, TaxiForSure, OlaCabs, Uber amongst others. TaxiForSure and the industry leader Uber (it just started its India presence though) are more a technology company than an aggregator company. They rely a lot on their web and mobile app and customer behavior prediction to drive the business.
An important aspect of their business is to assign drivers to bookings. It would be awesome if they can keep the customers informed about where the vehicle currently is.
Assigning drivers to bookings is not a easy task. Given traffic conditions and the driver’s inclination (or not) to go to a particular place, the assignment has to be made. In a city like Bangalore, the demand is far more than the supply. Also, there’s cancellations that need to be handled.
Given these constraints and conditions, I believe there’s a scope to build a solution that leverages the local traffic knowledge and then assign drivers to bookings. The data from drivers need to be mined. There’s tremendous scope for analytics in such a domain.
Pensive thoughts 