Cooperative Routing Problem between Customers and Vehicles for On-demand Mobile Facility Services

Abstract

On-demand mobile facility services are a promising approach to mitigate social problems related to transportation. Route optimization to satisfy customer demands is an essential technology to realize the services. Most studies of the route optimization for the services have been focused on finding a better assignment from vehicles to customers and a better order of visiting customer locations under the assumption that the customers waiting at the locations without moving. In this paper, we formulate cooperative routing problem between customers and vehicles, which minimizes total travel cost by optimizing both vehicle and customer routes. We also propose a heuristic approach to find solutions for large instances. We demonstrate that customer cooperation helps to reduce the total travel cost compared to a solution of standard vehicle routing problem in synthetic experiments using the road network of Manhattan, NY, USA. We confirmed that the total travel cost of the customers and the vehicles was reduced by 20% using our heuristics comparing to solutions of the vehicle routing problem with little extra computational cost.