7 research outputs found
Data analytics and optimization for assessing a ride sharing system
Ride-sharing schemes attempt to reduce road traffic by matching prospective passengers to drivers with spare seats in their cars. To be successful, such schemes require a critical mass of drivers and passengers. In current deployed implementations, the possible matches are based on heuristics, rather than real route times or distances. In some cases, the heuristics propose infeasible matches; in others, feasible matches are omitted. Poor ride matching is likely to deter participants from using the system. We develop a constraint-based model for acceptable ride matches which incorporates route plans and time windows. Through data analytics on a history of advertised schedules and agreed shared trips, we infer parameters for this model that account for 90% of agreed trips. By applying the inferred model to the advertised schedules, we demonstrate that there is an imbalance between riders and passengers. We assess the potential benefits of persuading existing drivers to switch to becoming passengers if appropriate matches can be found, by solving the inferred model with and without switching. We demonstrate that flexible participation has the potential to reduce the number of unmatched participants by up to 80%
An Optimization Approach to the Ordering Phase of an Attended Home Delivery Service
Attended Home Delivery (AHD) systems are used whenever a supplying company
offers online shopping services that require that customers must be present
when their deliveries arrive. Therefore, the supplying company and the customer
must both agree on a time window, which ideally is rather short, during which
delivery is guaranteed. Typically, a capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with
Time Windows forms the underlying optimization problem of the AHD system. In
this work, we consider an AHD system that runs the online grocery shopping
service of an international grocery retailer. The ordering phase, during which
customers place their orders through the web service, is the computationally
most challenging part of the AHD system. The delivery schedule must be built
dynamically as new orders are placed. We propose a solution approach that
allows to (non-stochastically) determine which delivery time windows can be
offered to potential customers. We split the computations of the ordering phase
into four key steps. For performing these basic steps we suggest both a
heuristic approach and a hybrid approach employing mixed-integer linear
programs. In an experimental evaluation we demonstrate the efficiency of our
approaches
The Guided Imaginary Projection, a new methodology for prospective ergonomics
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