25 research outputs found
Semi-Preemptive Routing on Trees
We study a variant of the pickup-and-delivery problem (PDP) in which the objects that have to be transported can be reloaded at most d times, for a given integer d. This problem is known to be polynomially solvable on paths or cycles and NP-complete on trees. We present a (4/3+epsilon)-approximation algorithm if the underlying graph is a tree. By using a result of Charikar et al. (1998), this can be extended to a O(log n log log n)-approximation for general graphs
Semi-Preemptive Routing on Trees
We study a variant of the pickup-and-delivery problem (PDP) in which the objects that have to be transported can be reloaded at most d times, for a given integer d. This problem is known to be polynomially solvable on paths or cycles and NP-complete on trees. We present a (4/3+epsilon)-approximation algorithm if the underlying graph is a tree. By using a result of Charikar et al. (1998), this can be extended to a O(log n log log n)-approximation for general graphs
On-line single server dial-a-ride problems
In this paper results on the dial-a-ride problem with a single server are presented. Requests for rides consist of two points in a metric space, a source and a destination. A ride has to be made by the server from the source to the destination. The server travels at unit speed in the metric space and the objective is to minimize some function of the delivery times at the destinations. We study this problem in the natural on-line setting. Calls for rides come in while the server is travelling. This models e.g. the taxi problem, or, if the server has capacity more than 1 a minibus or courier service problem. For two versions of this problem, one in which the server has infinite capacity and the other in which the server has capacity 1, both having as objective minimization of the time the last destination is served, we will design algorithms that have competitive ratio's of 2. We also show that these are best possible, since no algorithm can have competitive ratio better than 2 for these problems. Then we study the on-line problem with objective minimization of the sum of completion times of the rides. We prove a lower bound on the competitive ratio of any algorithm of 1 + \sqrt{2} for a server with any capacity and of 3 for servers with capacity 1
An asymptotically optimal algorithm for pickup and delivery problems
Pickup and delivery problems (PDPs), in which objects or people have to be transported between specific locations, are among the most common combinatorial problems in real-world operations. One particular PDP is the Stacker Crane problem (SCP), where each commodity/customer is associated with a pickup location and a delivery location, and the objective is to find a minimum-length tour visiting all locations with the constraint that each pickup location and its associated delivery location are visited in consecutive order. The SCP is a route optimization problem behind several transportation systems, e.g., Transportation-On-Demand (TOD) systems. The SCP is NP-Hard and the best know approximation algorithm only provides a 9/5 approximation ratio. We present an algorithm for the stochastic SCP which: (i) is asymptotically optimal, i.e., it produces a solution approaching the optimal one as the number of pickups/deliveries goes to infinity; and (ii) has computational complexity O(n[superscript 2+ϵ]), where n is the number of pickup/delivery pairs and ϵ is an arbitrarily small positive constant. Our results leverage a novel connection between the Euclidean Bipartite Matching Problem and the theory of random permutations.Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Cente
Asymptotically Optimal Algorithms for Pickup and Delivery Problems with Application to Large-Scale Transportation Systems
The Stacker Crane Problem is NP-Hard and the best known approximation
algorithm only provides a 9/5 approximation ratio. The objective of this paper
is threefold. First, by embedding the problem within a stochastic framework, we
present a novel algorithm for the SCP that: (i) is asymptotically optimal,
i.e., it produces, almost surely, a solution approaching the optimal one as the
number of pickups/deliveries goes to infinity; and (ii) has computational
complexity O(n^{2+\eps}), where is the number of pickup/delivery pairs
and \eps is an arbitrarily small positive constant. Second, we asymptotically
characterize the length of the optimal SCP tour. Finally, we study a dynamic
version of the SCP, whereby pickup and delivery requests arrive according to a
Poisson process, and which serves as a model for large-scale demand-responsive
transport (DRT) systems. For such a dynamic counterpart of the SCP, we derive a
necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of stable vehicle routing
policies, which depends only on the workspace geometry, the stochastic
distributions of pickup and delivery points, the arrival rate of requests, and
the number of vehicles. Our results leverage a novel connection between the
Euclidean Bipartite Matching Problem and the theory of random permutations,
and, for the dynamic setting, exhibit novel features that are absent in
traditional spatially-distributed queueing systems.Comment: 27 pages, plus Appendix, 7 figures, extended version of paper being
submitted to IEEE Transactions of Automatic Contro
Heuristic for the preemptive asymmetric stacker crane problem
International audienceIn this paper, we deal with the preemptive asymmetric stacker crane problem in an heuristic way. We first present some theoretical results which allow us to turn this problem into a specific tree design problem. We next derive from this new representation a simple, efficient local search heuristic, as well as an original LIP model. We conclude by presenting experimental results which aim at both testing the efficiency of our heuristic and at evaluating the impact of the preemption hypothesis
Ride Sharing with a Vehicle of Unlimited Capacity
A ride sharing problem is considered where we are given a graph, whose edges are equipped with a travel cost, plus a set of objects, each associated with a transportation request given by a pair of origin and destination nodes. A vehicle travels through the graph, carrying each object from its origin to its destination without any bound on the number of objects that can be simultaneously transported. The vehicle starts and terminates its ride at given nodes, and the goal is to compute a minimum-cost ride satisfying all requests. This ride sharing problem is shown to be tractable on paths by designing a O(h*log(h)+n) algorithm, with h being the number of distinct requests and with n being the number of nodes in the path. The algorithm is then used as a subroutine to efficiently solve instances defined over cycles, hence covering all graphs with maximum degree 2. This traces the frontier of tractability, since NP-hard instances are exhibited over trees whose maximum degree is 3