Swvl is a smart ride-sharing transportation provider that brings together travelers at certain times and locations with bus drivers ensuring affordability, reliability, and convenience to all parties. In this chapter, the authors briefly discuss Swvl's vision, history, the services Swvl provides, and Swvl team's values. Furthermore, they examine the various optimization problems at Swvl from both the demand and supply perspective, common problems' features, a typical research project lifecycle at Swvl, and how they apply decision sciences to their problems at Swvl. Examples of such decision sciences applications include mathematical modeling, data analytics, and graph algorithms. Swvl operates at a very large scale and continues to grow eminently, creating challenging, complex, and interesting problems faced every day. Such growth inspires a lot of research and effort put into improving the service quality and impacting many lives.
TopIntroduction
In recent years, there has been great technological advances that led to the widespread access to high-speed internet, reliable geolocation services (GPS) and smart phones. This caused a great resurgence of interest in online ride-sharing transportation services which in turn opened an avenue to many research efforts trying to solve problems related to Ride-sharing which can be found in surveys like [1] & [2].
With many companies trying to provide online ride-sharing services and replace traditional public transportation, Online ride-sharing became a crucial part of our everyday life that we rely on for almost all of our transportation needs. Most companies focused on providing taxi-like services and Swvl saw an opportunity to fill a gap in the market by providing a much-needed online bus-sharing service.
4 years ago, Swvl started with a dream of providing the world’s most reliable, affordable, and convenient transportation experience. Ever since, it has shown a great deal of growth, expanding vigorously in the MENA and Africa region. As shown in Figure 1, Swvl is currently operating in Egypt, Kenya, Pakistan, UAE, and Jordan on its way to 1 billion bookings.
More than 5 million users have been utilizing Swvl’s ride-sharing services across 5 countries and 8 cities ranging from daily commuters to work, schools, or universities to one-time errand-runners to inter-city travelers. Swvl strives to always put its customers first and value their time, money, and comfort. Not only does Swvl satisfy its riders and build a successful and profitable business, but it also provides steady incomes and convenient schedules for its captains, the people driving buses, and performing Swvl rides.
Figure 1. Locations where Swvl currently operates.
TopSwvl Services
Swvl uses high-technology capabilities to provide a few clicks-away means for customers to find safe, comfortable, and affordable rides with minimal walking and waiting times. Swvl is available as a mobile application on the Google Play, Apple, Huawei app stores. There are also specialized services accessible through the company’s website [3] and app stores for captains, employee commute for businesses, and travel. The applications enable customers to search for desired pickups and destinations, view trips’ details (locations, timings, prices, etc), confirm bookings, pay, track trips live before pick up until they get off the bus, and view captain contact details. Customers can also communicate with Swvl agents and bots to report problems. We can see examples of such services in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Examples for app and website [3] services
TopSwvl Team
In the background, a whole pipeline of automated services and highly talented teams cooperate to produce a service satisfying customers’ preferences and on a high standard that will let people choose it over on-demand yet expensive services such as taxis and private cars and still keep it within an affordable price range that is competitive with cheap public transportation.
Set out on an endeavor to be an employer of choice, Swvl is building a world-class team collaborating across continents so our doors are always open for partnership as seen in Figure 3.. Cross-functional teams work together and bring to the table different perspectives and solutions. For this, one of the core values at Swvl is to hire people better than us, who act as co-founders, since we all are. In our everyday work, we face a lot of tough challenges. We continue to promote a work environment that is productive, motivating, and challenging. We, at Swvl, speak one language, numbers. We are also bold enough to fail and wise enough to bounce back. We are always hustling and hungry to make a real difference, impacting the lives of millions of people. For us, customers and captains are the end destination and the starting point.
Figure 3. Open invitation to join Swvl’s expanding team