An OSGi-based smart taxi service platform

GPS enabled taxis provide us not only their locations and passenger status information in real-time, but also historical digital traces which could enable innovative services such as smart taxi dispatching, anomalous taxi detection, urban hotspots discovery, bus planning, and so on. Even though researchers have developed algorithms and systems in previous work targeting specific applications, there is no study on a general service framework that can integrate a scalable set of smart taxi services. In this paper, by identifying the potential services and applications in the previous research, we propose an integrated OSGi-based Smart Taxi Service Platform for taxi passengers, drivers, operators as well as the urban planners. By leveraging the component-based architecture of OSGi service framework, the proposed taxi service platform is highly scalable and reusable. We use the taxi fraud detection service as an example to show the reusability of the software components in the service platform, we further evaluate the system performance and response time using a large set of taxi GPS logs and verify the effectiveness of the platform.