Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp. and JapanTaxi Co. Ltd., along with KDDI Corp. and Accenture PLC, are testing an artificial intelligence-based taxi dispatch support system in Tokyo, according to a March 9 announcement.
The system, jointly developed by the four companies, uses data from taxi service logs and predictions of demographics made by location-based information from smartphones and events to predict demand for taxi services. It uses artificial intelligence to predict the number of occupied taxis in Tokyo through 500-meter, mesh-based parameters every 30 minutes.
The companies have been running trials of the taxi dispatch system since February. Drivers who used it during the pilot saw average sales increase by 20.4% on a month-to-month basis, according to the release.
The system is expected to be launched during the later part of 2018.
Japanese consumer electronics maker Sony Corp. is also reportedly developing an artificial intelligence-based taxi dispatch system in the country.
