424 research outputs found
On green routing and scheduling problem
The vehicle routing and scheduling problem has been studied with much
interest within the last four decades. In this paper, some of the existing
literature dealing with routing and scheduling problems with environmental
issues is reviewed, and a description is provided of the problems that have
been investigated and how they are treated using combinatorial optimization
tools
The dial-a-ride problem with electric vehicles and battery swapping stations
The Dial-a-Ride Problem (DARP) consists of designing vehicle routes and schedules for customers with special needs and/or disabilities. The DARP with Electric Vehicles and battery swapping stations (DARP-EV) concerns scheduling a fleet of EVs to serve a set of pre-specified transport requests during a certain planning horizon. In addition, EVs can be recharged by swapping their batteries with charged ones from any battery-swap stations. We propose three enhanced Evolutionary Variable Neighborhood Search (EVO-VNS) algorithms to solve the DARP-EV. Extensive computational experiments highlight the relevance of the problem and confirm the efficiency of the proposed EVO-VNS algorithms in producing high quality solutions
Vehicle Dispatching and Routing of On-Demand Intercity Ride-Pooling Services: A Multi-Agent Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Approach
The integrated development of city clusters has given rise to an increasing
demand for intercity travel. Intercity ride-pooling service exhibits
considerable potential in upgrading traditional intercity bus services by
implementing demand-responsive enhancements. Nevertheless, its online
operations suffer the inherent complexities due to the coupling of vehicle
resource allocation among cities and pooled-ride vehicle routing. To tackle
these challenges, this study proposes a two-level framework designed to
facilitate online fleet management. Specifically, a novel multi-agent feudal
reinforcement learning model is proposed at the upper level of the framework to
cooperatively assign idle vehicles to different intercity lines, while the
lower level updates the routes of vehicles using an adaptive large neighborhood
search heuristic. Numerical studies based on the realistic dataset of Xiamen
and its surrounding cities in China show that the proposed framework
effectively mitigates the supply and demand imbalances, and achieves
significant improvement in both the average daily system profit and order
fulfillment ratio
Agent-based transportation planning compared with scheduling heuristics
Here we consider the problem of dynamically assigning vehicles to transportation orders that have di¤erent time windows and should be handled in real time. We introduce a new agent-based system for the planning and scheduling of these transportation networks. Intelligent vehicle agents schedule their own routes. They interact with job agents, who strive for minimum transportation costs, using a Vickrey auction for each incoming order. We use simulation to compare the on-time delivery percentage and the vehicle utilization of an agent-based planning system to a traditional system based on OR heuristics (look-ahead rules, serial scheduling). Numerical experiments show that a properly designed multi-agent system may perform as good as or even better than traditional methods
A concise guide to existing and emerging vehicle routing problem variants
Vehicle routing problems have been the focus of extensive research over the
past sixty years, driven by their economic importance and their theoretical
interest. The diversity of applications has motivated the study of a myriad of
problem variants with different attributes. In this article, we provide a
concise overview of existing and emerging problem variants. Models are
typically refined along three lines: considering more relevant objectives and
performance metrics, integrating vehicle routing evaluations with other
tactical decisions, and capturing fine-grained yet essential aspects of modern
supply chains. We organize the main problem attributes within this structured
framework. We discuss recent research directions and pinpoint current
shortcomings, recent successes, and emerging challenges
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Modeling and Optimizing Routing Decisions for Travelers and On-demand Service Providers
This thesis investigates the dynamic routing decisions for individual travelers and on-demand service providers (e.g., regular taxis, Uber, Lyft, etc).
For individual travelers, this thesis models and predicts route choice at two time-scales: the day-to-day and within-day. For day-to-day route choice, methodological development and empirical evidences are presented to understand the roles of learning, inertia and real-time travel information on route choices in a highly disrupted network based on data from a laboratory competitive route choice game. The learning of routing policies instead of simple paths is modeled when real-time travel information is available, where a routing policy is defined as a contingency plan that maps realized traffic conditions to path choices. Using data from a competitive laboratory experiment, prediction performance is then measured in terms of both one-step and full trajectory predictions. For within day route choice, a recursive logit model is formulated in a stochastic time-dependent (STD) network without sampling any choice sets. A decomposition algorithm is then proposed so that the model can be estimated in reasonable time. Estimation and prediction results of the proposed model are presented using a data set collected from a subnetwork of Stockholm, Sweden.
Taxis and ride-sourcing vehicles play an important role in providing on-demand mobility in an urban transportation system. Unlike individual travelers, they do not have a clear destination when there\u27s no passenger on board. The optimal routing of a vacant taxi is formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem to maximize long-term profit over the full working period. Two approaches are proposed to solve the problem. One is the model-based approach where a model of the state transitions of the environment is obtained from queuing-theory based passenger arrival and competing taxi distribution processes. An enhanced value iteration for solving the MDP problem is then proposed making use of efficient matrix operations. The other is the model-free Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach, which learns the best policy directly from observed trajectory data. Both approaches are implemented and tested in a mega city transportation network with reasonable running time, and a systematic comparison of the two approaches is also provided
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Optimization and Technology-Based Strategies to Improve Public Transit Performance Accounting for Demand Distribution
Public transit is important to societies worldwide. The operation of public transit systems is generally associated with great benefits for the users, but there are also cases in which these systems demonstrate inefficient performance. Quantifying transit performance is an important area of research over the last decades. This dissertation presents models to improve transit system performance through optimization techniques and new technologies, recognizing the effects of non-uniform distribution of demand over space and time. The contributions span fixed route transit services and on-demand transit, as well as models for flexible transit operations that lie in between.
Regarding fixed route systems, a methodology is proposed to estimate the number of passengers being left-behind subway train vehicles due to overcrowding. Methods to identify appropriate time periods and locations for studying this phenomenon are presented. The effects of overcrowding on passenger waiting times are also investigated. The challenging case of transit networks where passengers tap-in only upon entrance is analyzed, adding a new methodology to a very short list of similar studies and enhancing previous work in this field.
For demand responsive systems, this dissertation focuses on optimizing the operation of paratransit services through coordination with alternative providers in order to decrease high operating costs of such a service. The analysis includes a heuristic-based method. The proposed model is more detailed than existing aggregated methods and is able to perform well in high demand levels, unlike existing exact approaches. This part of the dissertation also assists in making transportation network companies a complementary part of public transit, rather than a competitor.
Finally, flexible transit systems are studied to identify the operational and demand related characteristics of a service area that could serve as indicators of such systems\u27 efficient performance. The focus here is on route deviation flexible services. Continuous approximation is used to model this flexible system. A new optimized hybrid transit system with elements of both fixed route and flexible services is proposed. Finally, it is highlighted that the current COVID-19 pandemic has proven the need for public transit systems that could be adjusted to accommodate changes in transit demand
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