Proceedings of 2017 Tenth International Conference on Contemporary Computing ( IC3), 10-12 August 2017, Noida, India

Design and Implementation of an Intelligent Cab

Service System
Amar Nath, Ankit Khandelwal, Akul Kanojia, Ishitva Minocha, Rajdeep Niyogi
Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India
Email:{amardishilva, ankit.iitr3108, akulkanojia2415, i.minocha8, rajdeepniyogi }@gmail.com

Abstract—Cab booking service is a major transport service

provided by the various transport operators in a particular city.
Most of the people use cab service for their daily transportations
need. More and more taxi companies are looking for integrated
taxi booking systems as it makes life much easier for the customer Wireless communication network
as well for the company. Most of the existing online cabs booking GPS satellite
systems use the centralized approach to search, find, and book the
cab. The centralized approaches are highly prone to single point
of failure. In this study, we design and implement the intelligent Cab booking server
agents based distributed cab system for serving passengers using Passenger
local information. The implementation and analysis of proposed
approach are carried out by using a Java-based distributed multi-
agent system framework – Java Agent DEvelopment Framework
(JADE). Simulation results manifest that our approach is able to
encounter the shortcomings of the centralized approach. Passenger Passenger

Keywords:- online cab booking system; distributed algorithm;

Coalition formation; JADE.

I. I NTRODUCTION Cab Cab

Nowadays, especially in metro cities, taxicabs play a crucial Cab Cab

role in bridging the gap between public (e.g., state transport

Fig. 1: Remote cab booking protocol based on central server
buses, Indian railways etc.) and private transportation [1]. A
taxicab is a vehicle service, hired along with the driver for
either single or in a shared pool manner. It conveys passengers about his booking with a unique booking ID. Booking protocol
between the selected locations. Unlike public transport modes, followed in centralized online booking system is given below.
where the pickup and drop-off locations are predefined by
• At the start of the day, taxis are stationed at a fixed station.
the service provider, taxis provide a hybrid bus/taxi mode.
• Tasks are segregated and allocated in an optimal fashion,
Indian regulations make it mandatory for all taxicabs to
i.e., it takes into account nearness of end location to
install fare-meter. The taxicabs are very popular means of
start location, good task distribution and in the case of
transportation because it provides the comfortable, quicker and
immediate requests good redistribution.
secure journey.
• Requests are handled on First Come First Serve (FCFS)
Worldwide, taxis fulfill the same goal but differ significantly
basis and if booking is not available then, the request is
in its style of booking, i.e., manual, automatic, or via brokers.
queued subject to availability in case of cancellation.
This has gradually evolved with time and has surged from
manual to a phone call or online mode. Manual cab booking The important features of the centralized online system are
system requires the passenger to physically book the cab the mentioned below.
through booking office which therefore provides the liberty • All the queries are entertained by the central Server.

and scope of bargaining at both ends. While in online mode, • If the clients wish to change booking details then he

clients carry out booking either through phone or the Internet. would have to cancel the existing booking and request a
This indeed is quicker and faster but hinders bargaining. The new booking. This new booking would be treated afresh.
traditional online cab booking system is illustrated in Figure • The Meter readings are indicative of the traveled distance.

1. • The Reference Identification number (RFID) contains all

In online booking system database of booked/available taxis the necessary client details (ID Number).
is fed to the central server. All the bookings are query However, the centralized cab booking system has several
based which is directed to the central server and followed important features yet, it suffers from certain issues such as
by acknowledgment by the server. The customer is notified single point of failure, bargaining hindrance, no cab drivers

978-1-5386-3077-8/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE

 Proceedings of 2017 Tenth International Conference on Contemporary Computing ( IC3), 10-12 August 2017, Noida, India
involvement. However, all these issues are important and need
to be addressed, but pertinent among these is the single point
of failure as it may cause undue loss to the company if
central server turns down or breaks completely and recovery
may take minutes, hours or even days. It further leads to the
inconvenience of cost to the customer and financial loss to the
company. Hence, to avoid the losses due to the single point
failure and to ensure best suitable rate facility (via bargaining),
on online booking to the customer, a distributed algorithm
needs to be designed per say. Additionally, some liberty might
be given to the driver to enhance availability and to improve
the efficiency of the system altogether such that they(drivers)
could call in some more cabs at the location of opportunity and
necessity for the customer which would help in profit growth
of the company. In this paper, we proposed novel intelligent
agent based distributed cab booking system that addressed the
issues mentioned above. The cab is designed as autonomous,
intelligent and independent agents. Our distributed approached
can be easily add-on the cab infrastructure given by Kiam Tian
Seow et. al [7] as shown in Figure 2.
GPS satellite
Wireless communication network
Passenger
Cab
Cab
Cab
Cab
Fig. 2: Remote cab booking protocol based on distributed
approach
According to the distributed approach proposed in this
paper, the cab driver will be the main player as he is the
one with better visibility and knowledge about the current
situation of a particular region/location. We want to give more
liability to the cab drivers. In the centralized approach, they
are just mere agents who received the order via call and
provided service. In a distributed approach, if a driver finds
some opportunity at certain location emerged may be due to
a gathering of a birthday party, marriage, accidental scenario
etc. that need one or more cabs, the driver can call other cabs
that are presented within its vicinity.
Suppose some company’s cab driver reaches the concerned
spot and feels the need of around k number of cabs, the
driver calls k other cab(s) of the same company, thus fulfilling
the requirement without letting clients to make furthermore
requests to server, thus reducing traffic at server and also,
helped its company by not letting other companies to get
orders by avoiding the need to carry out booking at client’s
end. This protocol can help in enhancing the profit of the
company as well as avoids central booking system failure due
to peer to peer booking by the driver itself. We proposed the
distributed algorithm utilizing existing Contract Net Protocol
[9] that helps in gathering the cabs at opportunity place.
The most difficult thing involved with distributed system/al-
gorithm [10] is its simulation, verification, and implantation
because system’s elements are distributed and it is very hard to
assemble them under one umbrella [16]. We made an attempt
to implement the proposed distributed algorithm using Java
based JADA framework which supports the implementation
of the multi agent system.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Strides towards enhancing the cab facilities have never taken
the halt, efforts in the fields of online cab booking, cab team
formation, efficient functioning have led to the discovery of
valuable research works and implementations. Some of the
discussions include excerpts from the research works [1]–[8]
which showcase in details about different aspects of a taxicab
and emphasize on its role and contributions in offering a
comfortable and flexible service to public transport system.
On exploring the fields of Global Positioning System (GPS)
in integration with nearest-coordinate or related method, Der-
Horng Lee et al. [4], [6] from on Singapore taxi dispatch
system which proposes an alternative method, whereby the
dispatch of taxis is determined by real-time traffic conditions,
i.e. focus on the taxi which can reach to the customer in
shortest time. Talking about data mining techniques on mas-
sive transportation data, a research study in [2], shows the
investigation of the characteristics of travel behavior by urban
population. Moving on to HaoWang’s idea [3] of chaining the
trips where each pick-up point is chosen using customized
algorithm of Pickup and Delivery which results in pickup
location coinciding with (being within close proximity) the
previous drop-off location.
Major highlights are on EZ cabs proposed [5] concepts
and its application which allows clients to establish a peer
to peer network sort of booking which helps them fetching
nearby cabs using their cell phones or PDAs that are equipped
with short-range wireless network interfaces. The prototype
of EZ cab is of major use for understanding our proposed
algorithm for setting connections between Coordinator driver
and co-drivers, i.e. team formation. Since the team formation
is achieved by multi-agent collaboration so to understand this
very concept in the fields of cab services, studies of [7] are
worth a read.
Out of the discussed research works, only [5], [7] are based
on decentralization approach, which helps us establishing our
 Proceedings of 2017 Tenth International Conference on Contemporary Computing ( IC3), 10-12 August 2017, Noida, India
foundation more firmly, ranging from agreement mechanism
between the different agents (connoted at [9] as well) to
wireless network setup for distributed cab booking system.
Though some of the existing works [4], [6], [7], [23] have
discussed the distributed approach, to the best of the author’s
knowledge, no work in literature has addressed the issues
entailed in this paper.
In this paper, we proposed the novel approach based on
distributed Contract Net Protocol (CNP) which is one of the
important protocol for task allocation in multi-agent systems
consisting of a collection of nodes or software agents [9]. To
overcome the limitation where a task cannot be broken down
into subtask and a single agent is incapable of performing
such complex task alone (from the studies of CNP and its
extension works [11], [18], several new methodologies based
on coalition formation between agents have been discussed
in the research papers [15], [17], [18] but, none of these
methodologies is directly applicable to our problem.
III. P ROPOSED D ISTRIBUTED A PPROACH FOR O NLINE
C AB B OOKING S YSTEM
In this section, we present our distributed approach to
online cab booking system. Often in the changing and grow-
ing demand for the easy transportation facilities, online cab
booking system has been an integral part of technical usage
in transportation. The approaches available [1]–[4], [6], [8]
for cab dispatch and booking system mostly are centralized or
partially distributed in nature. Even though, the decentralized
approaches [5], [7] available, do not focus the issues outlined
by us in introduction, i.e., driver participation in cab booking
and bargaining facility. In this section, we present the dis-
tributed approach for online cab booking via bargaining and
cab coalition formation.
Description of the Approach :
The multiagent taxi dispatch architecture (MTDA) proposed
by Kiam Tian Seow et. al [7] has been considered to im-
plement our approach. MTDA assume that the geographical
road network of a city is divided into r logical areas of taxi
operation. According to our proposed approach, the online
cab booking process is initiated by the passenger who needs
a cab by broadcasting the Request message. The Request
message contains the current and destination location of the
passenger. This request goes to all local cab drivers presented
in that vicinity. An acknowledgment is sent by cabs and their
availability status by sending Free or Busy message.
If the cab is free then it sends Free message otherwise send
the Busy message. The free message contains the fare of the
trip calculated by cabs system. On receipt of Free messages
from most all cabs, passenger send MyPrice message that
contains the fare that he wish to give for the trip. Now, cabs
reply by the FinalPrice message in which cabs sends final
price that they will charge for the trip. Actually, sometime
cab ready to go with fewer prices that they have decided
for the trip because of their low running business or due to
some other reasons. After receiving the final replies from cabs,
passenger select the cab ready with minimum fare and send a
TakeMe message to the cab that is selected by him and NOT-
REQUIRED to others. The bargaining algorithm is shown in
Algorithm 1
Fig. 3: An agent based cab infrastructure [7]
Algorithm 1 :Distributed algorithm for bargaining
1: Initialization of bargaining process;
2: Passenger P1 checks for all the available cabs in the local vicinity and start the
process by broadcasting Request message to all the cabs;
3: An acknowledgment is sent by cab which is free and replies back their availability
status by sending Free or Busy message. The Free message indicates its
willingness and contains minimum fare for the trip;
4: All those cabs which revert as Free become eligible to be a negotiation;
5: After receiving a Free message from cabs, passenger decides to what fare he
want to give for that trip;
6: Passenger send MyPrice to all cabs those had sent Free;
7: Now cabs send FinalPrice to passenger;
8: Passenger selects the cab which has sent least fare;
9: Passenger P1 sends TakeME message to the cab C1 which’s fare is least;
10: After receiving the TakeME message cab drive start to move towards the
customer;
11: End of bargaining process;
12: Exit;
After receiving the TakeMe message, cab driver moves
towards passengers location to pick him. Now, if the cab
driver founds some opportunity at that location or on the
way emerged may be due to a gathering of birthday a party,
marriage, accidental scenario etc. that he feels, need more cabs
then, driver call (gather) other cabs of his company to that
location. He estimates the total number cabs required and call
that much of cabs at that location. Hence, those cabs waiting
for passenger get the passengers. This maximizes the total
utilized of cabs that enhance the total profit of the company.
Cabs gathering algorithm constructed by utilizing Contract Net
Protocol is shown in Algorithm 2.
Pseudo explanatory code for the proposed distributed cab
gathering algorithm is given in Algorithm 2. Let, n be the
total number of cabs available and k be the number of cabs
required. Let cab driver C1 Hence, cab driver D1 become the
coordinator in this case.
The execution of the algorithm 1 and 2, ensures all the
required conditions of decentralization with additional feature
 Proceedings of 2017 Tenth International Conference on Contemporary Computing ( IC3), 10-12 August 2017, Noida, India
Algorithm 2 : Distributed algorithm for cab gathering
1: C1 initialize cabs gathering process
2: Coordinator cab C1 checks for all the available co-cabs in the local vicinity and
start the process by broadcasting “Availability Status” message to all the co-
cabs;
3: An acknowledgment is sent by co-cabs which reply back their availability status
by sending Free or Busy message;
4: All those co-cabs which revert as Free become eligible to be chosen for the
coalition;
5: After receiving availability status from co-cabs, coordinator driver decide to whom
to call. Coordinator cabs C1 count the Free messages sent by co-driver, by
increasing its counter c;
6: if (f ≥ k) then d k = cabs required to call
7: Coordinator cabs C1 sends joinTeam message to any k out of f agents
and sends “noCall” to (f − k) agents;
8: Upon receipt of “joinJob” message co-cabs driver move to coordinator’s
location;
9: End of cabs gathering process;
of avoiding interference by multiple coordinators at the time
of processing or executing the protocol.
IV. I MPLEMENTATION WITH JADE
The implementation of the proposed distributed algorithm
for cab gathering at some location is carried out by Multi
Agent System (MAS) based framework known as Java Agent
DEvelopment Framework (JADE). MASs are now getting rec-
ognized widely as preferred approach for the development of
distributed applications. A distributed application has multiple
autonomous units involved that communicate with each other
to coordinate their common goal [19]. Each running instance
of the JADE runtime environment is called a container as it
can contain several agents.
In JADE has set of active containers which are called a Plat-
form. A single special Main container must always be active in
a platform and all other containers register with it as soon as
they start. Besides the ability to accept registrations from other
containers, the main container differs from normal containers as
it holds two special agents (automatically started when the main
container is launched). The AMS (Agent Management System)
that provides the naming service (i.e. ensures that each agent
in the platform has a unique name) and represents the authority
in the platform (for instance it is possible to create/kill agents
on remote containers by requesting that to the AMS). This
tutorial does not illustrate how to interact with the AMS as this
is part of the advanced JADE programming. The DF (Directory
Facilitator) that provides a Yellow Pages service by means of
which an agent can find other agents providing the services he
requires in order to achieve his goals. JADE allows easy
extension with ad-on module due to its flexible distributed
infrastructure nature. It provides an easy framework for
developing the complete agent-based applica- tions. JADE is a
graphical tool that provides a dynamic envi- ronment (means of
a run-time environment) to design, debug, develop and test the
agents based distributed applications. The JADE is completely
developed using Java language and it can be easily plug-in with
any Java development framework, Neat- beans, Eclipse etc.
Research & Development department of
Telecom Italia was the first company which initially developed
the JADE as an open source framework [19], [21]–[23].
Fig. 4: Containers and platforms of JADE framework [21]
The above features of the JADE motivate us to implement
the cab gathering algorithm given in Algorithm 2. While
implementing the algorithm, we assume cab as agents of
JADE. Each cab is treated as independent and autonomous
agents. Cabs are identified with an id, i.e., Agent Identifier
(AID) because JADE facilitates identification of each agent
by a globally unique name called an Agent Identifier (AID)
consisting basically of the agent’s local name and its addresses.
In JADE framework messages are transmitted asynchronously
and Message Transport Service (MTS) defined by FIPA en-
ables message exchange within and between platforms [22].
Each agent has a message queue where the JADE runtime
posts messages sent by other agents; whenever a message is
posted to the message queue, the receiving agent is notified.
The programmer, however, determines if and when the agent
actually picks up the message from the queue to process it.
FIPA-ACL message structure specifications are used in
JADE and message format has fields such as the sender,
list of receivers, communicative act (REQUEST, INFORM,
PROPOSE etc), content language and ontology [24].
A. Creating Cab as an Agent in JADE:
Cab as an intelligent agent is created in JADE framework
under an existing jade.core.Agent class and implementing the
setup() method. The JADE allows creating agents in the same
container under one platform or different container of the
different platform.
V. R ESULTS AND A NALYSIS
The experiment has been carried out to demonstrate the
working of the cab coalition formation. For this, we used the
eclipse plug-in of JADE [20]. The experiments are carried
TM
out by using Intel Core i7-5550U Processor, 8-GB of
RAM and Window-7 operating system. Several tests have been
 Proceedings of 2017 Tenth International Conference on Contemporary Computing ( IC3), 10-12 August 2017, Noida, India

performed to evaluate the cab gathering at some location via Hello! Cab C1@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE is
coalition formation using JADE [20]. A coalition needs to be ready to serve.
formed prior to gathering the required cabs at some specified Hello! Cab A2@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE is
ready to serve.
location via asynchronous messages passing. The coalition Hello! Cab A3@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE is
is formed via communication-based agreement. We identified ready to serve.
that JADE is the suitable tool that provides asynchronous Hello! Cab A4@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE is
message passing facility among agents. The gathering of cabs ready to serve.
is achieved by the Algorithm 2 and respective results obtained May 18, 2017 12:58:26 PM
jade.core.AgentContainerImpl
are shown below. As soon as the coalition is formed the cabs joinPlatform
that have been selected for coalition become available at the INFO:
calling spot. --------------------------------------
The output of the JADE after successful of team formation Agent container
Main-Container@192.168.1.10 is ready.
detailed below. The cab driver C1 is assumed as a coordinator
--------------------------------------------
and it calls two more cabs at some location. Initially, cab Required numbrs of Cabs for C1 is 2
drivers A1, C2, A2, A3, and A4 are free and they ready to take Trying form a coalition C1
the call from coordinator drive C1. Finally, driver C1 choose Found the following Cabs by: C1
A1 and A2 to be the part of team/coalition and C2 and A3 (agent-identifier :name
A1@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE:
get freed by C1. Hence, by consensus to all cabs, the final
addresses (sequence
coalition is formed and within a finite amount of time, the http://192.168.1.10:7778/acc ))
selected cabs reach to the desired location. The overall results (agent-identifier :name
obtained which are shown below, support our hypothesis. C2@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE:
addresses (sequence
http://192.168.1.10:7778/acc ))
(agent-identifier :name
A2@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE:
addresses (sequence
http://192.168.1.10:7778/acc ))
(agent-identifier :name
C1@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE:
addresses (sequence
http://192.168.1.10:7778/acc ))
(agent-identifier :name
A3@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE:
addresses (sequence
http://192.168.1.10:7778/acc ))
(agent-identifier :name
A4@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE:
addresses (sequence
http://192.168.1.10:7778/acc ))

A1is free for now

C2is free for now
A2is free for now
Fig. 5: Active agents in agent platform of JADE
A3is free for now
A4is free for now
C2 going in team of C1
May 18, 2017 12:58:25 PM A1 going in team of C1
jade.core.Runtime beginContainer A4 going in team of C1
INFO: ---------------------------------- A3 going in team of C1
This is JADE 4.4.0 - revision 6778 of A2 going in team of C1
21-12-2015 12:24:43 C1 my Teamate C2@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE
downloaded in Open Source, under LGPL C1 my Teamate A1@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE
restrictions, A4 is free to be in anyone’s coalition
at http://jade.tilab.com/ A3 is free to be in anyone’s coalition
---------------------------------------- C1 @192.168.1.10:1099/JADE
Got all the required Cabs!
Cab Coalition is formed sucessfully!
INFO: MTP addresses: A2 is free to be in anyone’s coalition
http://192.168.1.10:7778/acc
Hello! Cab A1@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE is
ready to serve.
Hello! Cab C2@192.168.1.10:1099/JADE is
ready to serve.
 Proceedings of 2017 Tenth International Conference on Contemporary Computing ( IC3), 10-12 August 2017, Noida, India

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