A Differential-Private Framework for Urban Traffic Flows Estimation via Taxi Companies

Due to the prominent development of public transportation systems, the taxi flows could nowadays work as a reasonable reference to the trend of urban population. Being aware of this knowledge will significantly benefit regular individuals, city planners, and the taxi companies themselves. However, to mindlessly publish such contents will severely threaten the private information of taxi companies. Both their own market ratios and the sensitive information of passengers and drivers will be revealed. Consequently, we propose in this paper a novel framework for privacy-preserved traffic sharing among taxi companies, which jointly considers the privacy, profits, and fairness for participants. The framework allows companies to share scales of their taxi flows, and common knowledge will be derived from these statistics. Two algorithms are proposed for the derivation of sharing schemes in different scenarios, depending on whether the common knowledge can be accessed by third parties like individuals and governments. The differential privacy is utilized in both cases to preserve the sensitive information for taxi companies. Finally, both algorithms are validated on real-world data traces under multiple market distributions.