Delivery and mobility / Ride-hailing
Uber: Predicting airport wait times and driver earnings
- Company
- Uber
- Country
- United States
- Adoption stage
- In operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
Airports weigh heavily in Uber's mobility business. 15 percent of global mobility gross bookings come from airports. Drivers often waited a long time in an airport first-in-first-out queue before receiving a request. There was also the problem of the driver at the front of the queue repeatedly declining requests. On the rider side, time spent looking at the matching screen grew longer and cancellation rates rose.
Technology and data
Uber built several prediction models for airports. ETR predicts, in one-hour-ahead windows, how long a driver in the first-in-first-out queue will wait before receiving a request. EPH shows in real time the hourly earnings potential of an airport trip against a city trip. EPH uses a Deep GMM that predicts the mean and the variance together. The inputs are queue data, demand data such as app openings and past requests, weather data such as temperature and rainfall, and near-real-time flight arrival and departure information. The predicted values are shown by airport on the driver app screen. Whether to go to the airport is the driver's decision.
Results
Uber said the new ETR model raised precision on short wait times by 30 percent in absolute terms. Here a short wait means 0-15 minutes after joining the airport queue. The mean predicted by the EPH model is shown for each airport in the driver app. Drivers can now see wait time and earnings outlook together before deciding to head for an airport.
Limits and open questions
The feature that predicts a driver shortage and calls drivers to the airport is still at the development and experiment stage. Uber said it plans further improvement before full operational release.
Sources
- Forecasting Models to Improve Driver Availability at Airportsuber.com, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.