Towards Participatory Design of Multi-agent Approach to Transport Demands

The design of multi-agent based simulations (MABS) is up to now mainly done in laboratories and based on designers understanding of the activities to be simulated. Domain experts have little chance to directly validate agent behaviors. To fill this gap, we are investigating participatory methods of design, which allow users to participate in the design the pickup and delivery problem (PDP) in the taxi planning problem. In this paper, we present a participatory process for designing new socio-technical architectures to afford the taxi dispatch for this transportation system. The proposed dispatch architecture attempts to increase passenger satisfaction more globally, by concurrently dispatching multiple taxis to the same number of passengers in the same geographical region, and vis-a-vis human driver and dispatcher satisfaction.