Service-requester-centered service selection and ranking model for digital transportation ecosystems

Transport services are a fundamental utility that drives human society. A Digital Transportation Ecosystem is a sub-system of the Digital Ecosystem, which uses ICT resources to facilitate transport service transactions. This research focuses on the selection and ranking of online transport service information. The previous research in this area has been unable to achieve satisfactory performance or give sufficient freedom to service requesters to rank services based on their preferences. ‘User-centered design’ is a broad term to describe how end-users influence system design. In this research, we propose a Service-Requester-Centered Service Selection and Ranking Model, guided by the philosophy of user-centered design. Three major sub-models are involved in this model: a model for assisting service requesters to search appropriate transport service ontology concepts to denote their service requests, a model for enhancing the accuracy of automatic transport service concept recommendation by observing service requesters’ click behaviours, and a model for enabling service-requester-preference-based service ranking. Implementations and empirical experiments are conducted to evaluate the three sub-models and the drawn conclusions along with directions for future work are outlined.