Electrification of transportation is critical for a low-carbon society. Inparticular, public vehicles (e.g., taxis) provide a crucial opportunity forelectrification. Despite the benefits of eco-friendliness and energyefficiency, adoption of electric taxis faces several obstacles, includingconstrained driving range, long recharging duration, limited charging stationsand low gas price, all of which impede taxi drivers' decisions to switch toelectric taxis. On the other hand, the popularity of ride-hailing mobile appsfacilitates the computerization and optimization of taxi service strategies,which provide computer-assisted decisions of navigation and roaming for taxidrivers to locate potential customers. This paper examines the viability ofelectric taxis with the assistance of taxi service strategy optimization, incomparison with conventional taxis with internal combustion engines. A big dataanalysis is provided using a large dataset of real-world taxi trips in New YorkCity. Our methodology is to first model the computerized taxi service strategyby Markov Decision Process (MDP), and then devise the optimized taxi servicestrategy based on NYC taxi trip dataset. The profitability of electric taxidrivers is studied empirically under various battery capacity and chargingconditions. Consequently, we shed light on the solutions that can improveviability of electric taxis.
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