Abstract
This paper considers vehicle dispatching for a flexible transit system providing doorstep services from a terminal. The problem is tackled with an easy-to-implement threshold policy, where an available vehicle is dispatched when the number of boarded passengers reaches or exceeds a certain threshold. A simulation-based approach is applied to find the threshold that minimizes the expected system-wide cost. Results show that the optimal threshold is a function of demand, which is commonly stochastic and time-varying. Consequently, the dispatching threshold should be adjusted for different times of the day. In addition, the simulation-based approach is used to simultaneously adjust dispatching threshold and fleet size. The proposed approach is the first work to analyse threshold dispatching policy. It could be used to help improve efficiency of flexible transit systems, and thereby make this sustainable travel mode more economical and appealing to users.
Highlights
The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 has encouraged the implementation of flexible transit systems, which provide doorstep services to passengers who are unable to use the conventional transit with fixed routes and schedules
A lot of work has focused on the development and implementation of vehicle routing and scheduling algorithms. Examples of such algorithms include various heuristics, metaheuristics and exact methods for routing prescheduled requests (Jaw [10], Toth and Vigo [11], Cordeau [12]), as well as techniques for real-time scheduling of dynamic requests (Teodorovic and Radivojevic [13], Attanasio et al [14], Coslovich et al [15]). It appears that very little effort was made towards studying the optimal dispatching control of flexible one-to-many transit systems, which is a relevant problem for transportation companies providing doorstep services from hospitals, airports, metro and train stops
In spite of rich literature concerned with simulation-based analysis of flexible transit systems, this appears to be the first paper to consider the problem of optimal vehicle dispatching for one-to-many flexible transit services
Summary
The passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 has encouraged the implementation of flexible transit systems, which provide doorstep services to passengers who are unable to use the conventional transit with fixed routes and schedules. Examples of such algorithms include various heuristics, metaheuristics and exact methods for routing prescheduled requests (Jaw [10], Toth and Vigo [11], Cordeau [12]), as well as techniques for real-time scheduling of dynamic requests (Teodorovic and Radivojevic [13], Attanasio et al [14], Coslovich et al [15]) It appears that very little effort was made towards studying the optimal dispatching control of flexible one-to-many transit systems, which is a relevant problem for transportation companies providing doorstep services from hospitals, airports, metro and train stops. Given this randomness inherent to real-world operations, we would expect to have routes of considerably different durations, and non-uniform arrivals of vehicles at the terminal to pick up new passengers In such a one-to-many demand responsive system with stochastic route durations, proposing a fixed schedule for vehicle departures would imply some obvious drawbacks. We draw conclusions and discuss possible extensions of this work
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