Research meetup 4 – Analytics to improve mobility for elderly and disabled citizen
In this webinar, we highlight the benefits of analytics in assisted door-to-door travel on long distances for elderly and disabled people. Hundreds of thousands of Dutch citizens are eligible for subsidized taxi rides in the “Valys” mobility system. This results in about 5,000 taxi rides on a regular day, and up to 15,000 on a Christmas day. The day-to-day planning of these relatively long taxi requests – on average 50 kilometers between origin and destination – is a complex and daunting task split over dozens of subcontractors. The government’s main contractor and transportation coordinator Transvision organized a competitive challenge to produce better operational plans. For this, we created a new taxi combination algorithm that plans the taxi rides nation-wide over the subcontracted regions. Furthermore, we implemented the solution, resulting in improved passenger satisfaction and a massive reduction of up to 100,000 driving kilometers per day compared to plans that only combines rides within subcontracted regions. In this talk, we explain the impact of this algorithm and discuss practical considerations faced by analytic practitioners when designing analytics solutions for real-life, large-scale problems. We also explain how we used this innovative algorithm in respond to changing circumstances, such as new travel requirements following the COVID-19 epidemic.