SMU Assistant Professor of Information Systems Cheng Shih-Fen builds agent-based models to better understand complex systems and optimise their performance. To make better predictions, test hypotheses or generate new recommendations, models come in handy, especially the agent-based models that Assistant Prof Cheng Shih-Fen specialises in developing. With urban mobility becoming a high priority in densely populated cities, Assistant Prof Cheng and his colleagues have decided to study taxi operations in Singapore. Using a large data set from a local taxi fleet to analyse the behaviour of cabbies, they showed that top earners anticipated where the customers would be, and moved elsewhere when they had too much competition in a given area.