Title: Scheduling and short-term demand forecasting in an on-demand ride service industry

Authors: Ritesh Adhyapak

Addresses: Indian School of Business (ISB), Mohali, Knowledge City, Sector 81, Punjab 160062, India

Abstract: Short-term demand for cabs in small cab aggregators fluctuate at different times of the week. Therefore, proper scheduling of cab drivers is of paramount importance for cab service providers who have resource constraints. The paper reviews the use of demand forecasting using time series modelling to forecast the best technique in predicting future demand using moving average, exponential smoothing and multiplicative seasonality method. Arena simulation is applied using Poisson distribution to simulate the waiting time of customers to book a cab. The modelling approach is undergone in a cab service company which showed that forecasting by multiplicative seasonality method produced the best results with minimal error in MAD, MSE, and MAPE. Consequently, transportation companies have a seasonality pattern in the demand for cabs and hence can utilise multiplicative seasonality modelling technique to better analyse short-term demand in cabs.

Keywords: cab service; time series modelling; Arena simulation; Poisson distribution; short-term demand; scheduling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSOM.2021.120056

International Journal of Services and Operations Management, 2021 Vol.40 No.4, pp.459 - 477

Received: 05 Jun 2018
Accepted: 04 Jun 2019
Published online: 06 Jan 2022 *

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