Reasons for adopting SAVS and requests upon the introduction

"In Kumenan-cho, we have started 'Kappie Noriai Go' since FY 2016, which is a door-to-door reservation-based transportation service available for citizens as transportation within the town. As SRT, Inc., a taxi company that has its branch in the town, is in charge of the operation, the service is now widely accepted by citizens as daily transportation in the aging town. On the other hand, as staff in charge of vehicle allocation used to receive reservation calls and make operation plans, the company had no choice but to limit several operations for streamlining their work. Therefore, we evaluated the previous operating system and started to consider introducing the AI-based car-allocation service to make the service more convenient and efficient".

Things they realized by implementing SAVS after conducting verification tests

"Through the long-term operation of Kappie Noriai Go, we have accumulated operation records (places of hop-ons and hop-offs, time, etc.) that are sufficient for the evaluation. As a result of an analysis by SAVS simulation based on the data, we found out that four sedans can be substituted for six vehicles (including big-sized taxis) that used to operate. Moreover, although we used to set operational limits such as (1) Bus schedules (2) Reservation an hour in advance (morning services should be reserved a day in advance) (3) Operational areas that divide the town into five zones (passengers need to change buses when going to other zones) and (4) Reservation by phone calls, we found out that there is no problem in removing those limits. Based on the results, we have started AI-based car-allocation operation by SAVS from 20 January 2020. We have successfully realized the improvement of passengers' convenience and cost reduction by decreasing the number of vehicles".