Challenges and Opportunities in Taxi Fleet Anomaly Detection

To enhance fleet operation and management, logistics companies instrument their vehicles with GPS receivers and network connec-tivity to servers. Mobility traces from such large fleets provide sig-nificant information on commuter travel patterns, traffic congestion and road anomalies, and hence several researchers have mined such datasets to gain useful urban insights. These logistics companies, however, incur significant cost in deploying and maintaining their vast network of instrumented vehicles. Thus research problems, that are not only of interest to urban planners, but to the logis-tics companies themselves are important to attract and engage these companies for collaborative data analysis. In this paper, we show how GPS traces from taxis can be used to answer three different questions that are of great interest to a taxi operator. These questions are 1) What is the occupancy rate of th