12 research outputs found
An Agent-Based Approach to Self-Organized Production
The chapter describes the modeling of a material handling system with the
production of individual units in a scheduled order. The units represent the
agents in the model and are transported in the system which is abstracted as a
directed graph. Since the hindrances of units on their path to the destination
can lead to inefficiencies in the production, the blockages of units are to be
reduced. Therefore, the units operate in the system by means of local
interactions in the conveying elements and indirect interactions based on a
measure of possible hindrances. If most of the units behave cooperatively
("socially"), the blockings in the system are reduced.
A simulation based on the model shows the collective behavior of the units in
the system. The transport processes in the simulation can be compared with the
processes in a real plant, which gives conclusions about the consequencies for
the production based on the superordinate planning.Comment: For related work see http://www.soms.ethz.c
Impact of Competition on Quality of Service in Demand Responsive Transit
Demand responsive transportation has the potential to provide efficient public door-to-door transport with a high quality. In currently implemented systems in the Netherlands, however, we observe a decrease in the quality of service (QoS), expressed in longer travel times for the customers. Currently, generally one transport company is responsible for transporting all customers located in a specified geographic zone. In general it is known that when multiple companies compete on costs, the price for customers decreases. In this paper, we investigate whether a similar result can be achieved when competing on quality instead. To arrive at some first conclusions, we set up a multiagent environment to simulate the assignment of rides to companies through an auction on QoS, and the insertion of allocated rides in the companies' schedules using online optimization. Our results reveal that this set-up improves the quality of the service offered to the customers at moderately higher costs.Software Computer TechnologyElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
A Decentralised Approach for the Transportation On Demand Problem
Summary. Public transport systems are generally organized in a static, a priori way. In such systems, the demand must be adapted to the offer. In this paper, we propose a model based on self-organization in order to dispatch a fleet of vehicles in a purely dynamic Transportation On Demand system (TOD). Our proposal consists in a decentralized approach and a multi-agent system (MAS) to model the environment. This will tackle the problem of vehicles over-concentration or the lack of service in certain areas of the city. We demonstrate that our model addresses these problems by providing vehicle agents, for a given request, to make the final decision thanks to a negotiation process and to calculate overcosts according to an original insertion heuristic. Key words: transportation on demand, vehicle routing problem, collective intelligence, self-organization.