Probabilistic Dynamic Programming Applied to Transportation Network Optimization (original) (raw)

Stochastic Route Planning in Public Transport

Transportation Research Procedia

Journey planning is a key process in public transport, where travelers get informed how to make the best use of a given public transport system for their individual travel needs. A common trait of most available journey planners is that they assume deterministic travel times, but vehicles in public transport often deviate from their schedule. The present paper investigates the problem of finding journey plans in a stochastic environment. To fully exploit the flexibility inherent in multi-service public transport systems, we propose to use the concept of a routing policy instead of a linear journey plan. A policy is a state-dependent routing advice which specifies a set of services at each location from which the traveler is recommended to take the one that arrives first. We consider current time dependent policies, that is, when the routing advice at a given location is based solely on the current time. We propose two heuristic solutions that find routing policies that perform better than deterministic journey plans. A numerical comparison shows the achievable gains when applying the different heuristic policies based on extensive simulations on the public transport network of Budapest. The results show that the probability of arriving on time to a given destination can be significantly improved by following a policy instead of a linear travel plan.

Optimization Time and Path for Employee Transportation

Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing

Finding the employee pickup location plan is a hard work for transportation companies because it is a manual task that takes hours of work with the possibility of error. In this context, we propose an adaptive decision system that allows transport companies to find the optimal path. The proposed system is based on an optimization process that maximizes the fill rate and minimizes pickup time. In this article, we present the process of time optimization and the path for personnel transport. The process generates a plan for the points to be visited and the number to be transported for each vehicle. The proposed process consists of four stages: the first one allows to model the real situation in directed graph; the nodes are the pickup location and the arcs are the roads. The second step is to represent the graph in the form of a square matrix of order (n * n) knowing that n is the number of pickup points. The third step generates all possible paths with the number of each trip. Based on the results of the third step, we assign vehicles to each journey based on type and capacity, starting with the path that has the most manpower in order to transport the maximum number of personnel. After having specified the points to be visited, we use the Dijiksra algorithm to find the optimal route to follow taking into account the traffic jam.

Optimization of Bus Stops, New Pick-up and Drop-off Locations for Public Transportation

Journal of Information and Data Management - JIDM, 2018

The increase in urban population, together with the expansion of cities, has motivated the study of improvements for dynamics aspects of daily urban life. An important portion of these dynamic aspects is related to the population’s routine activities, like commuting using public transportation. This work proposes two meta-heuristics and one integer programming modeling to analyze the location of bus stops and propose new pick-up and drop-off locations in order to avoid long walks to take the bus. A real dataset of the road network was integrated to the location of bus stops in the city of Belo Horizonte. Computing approaches were proposed to optimize the location of bus stops in a scalable way. Experimental results show that many new bus stops are required to improve the quality of the service rendered to the population.

Optimization of Vehicle Routing in Simultaneous Pickup and Delivery Service: A Case study Author: Natnael Mekonenn, Balasundaram

Sretechjournal Publications, 2018

In this case study, considered the vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery which is a generalization of the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). The vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery (VRPPD) arises whenever pickup demand and delivery demand is to be satisfied by the same vehicle. The problem is encountered in many real life situations. In this paper problem arises from the distribution of beverages and collection of recyclable containers. It can be modeled as a variant of the vehicle routing problem with a heterogeneous vehicle fleet, capacity and volume constraints, and an objective function combining routing distance or minimizing the total travel distance to serve customers located to different locations. Three construction heuristics and an improvement procedure are developed for the problem and designing a set of routes with minimum cost to serve a delivery of beverages and a collection of recyclable material with a fleet of vehicles. The aim of this paper is to develop a vehicle routing Problem (VRP) model that addresses simultaneous pickup and delivery in the beverage distribution. To this effect, a mathematical model is adopted and fitted with real data collected from MOHA Soft drinks Summit Plant located in Ethiopia, and solved using Clark-Wright saving algorithm. The form-to-distance is computed from the data collected from Google Earth and the customer’s data from the MOHA. The findings of the study show that the model is feasible and showed an improvement as compared to the current performances of the plant with respect to product distribution and collection and the total distance covered is minimized about 27.79%. The average performances of the model show that on average 5 routes are required to serve customers’ demands.

Transit assignment model incorporating the bus bunching effect

This paper proposes a transit assignment model considering the correlation between vehicles' arrival at stops. The correlation of arrival is represented with a correlation coefficient matrix, and the expected waiting time and the arc split probabilities at stops are calculated with a Monte Carlo simulation-based method where the correlated random variates follow a given distribution function. This function is generated using dependent random variates which follow a normal distribution and a correlation coefficient matrix. Since the correlation coefficients are defined as a function of the number of boarding and alighting passengers, it is possible to consider two sources of correlation in the proposed model; i) increasing boarding and alighting time due to passengers' concentration to a certain vehicle, ii) concentrating vehicles on a certain road segment. The proposed model is formulated as a fixed point problem and the solution approach is illustrated with a toy network.

Influence of Unscheduled Random Public Bus Stops on Transit Travel Time

Journal of Traffic and Logistics Engineering, 2013

Transit Travel time can affect to a large extent the service reliability, operating cost, and system efficiency. This research paper aims to study the negative impact of the unscheduled random public bus stops on travel time for a particular bus route in Cairo, Egypt. These unscheduled stops became a usual behavior for Cairo Public buses, which affects more than four and a half million daily users of this transportation service inside Cairo. In this study, a comprehensive research plan was designed to collect the data concerning the bus behavior along a selected bus route, using GPS data logger. The data collection included time, location, speed, unscheduled stops, and scheduled stops. The collected data was then used to develop a trip time model. The developed model revealed the delay time due to the unscheduled bus stops and the scheduled bus stops. The analysis of the data also showed that passengers rely much more on the unscheduled random bus stops than the scheduled bus stops. The study concluded that minimizing the unscheduled bus stops will decrease the trip time, and so improve the service reliability to a large degree.  Index Terms-Travel time, unscheduled random public bus stops, GPS data logger, trip time model, service reliability. 20

Optimization of New Pick-up and Drop-off Points for Public Transportation

The expansion of cities, together with the advance of technological resources, has motivated the study of improvements for metropolitan dynamics. Among these improvements are those aiming to facilitate and to speed up the population's routine activities. This work proposes and compares two methods to optimize the location of new pickup and drop-off points in order to avoid long walks to get to a bus stop. Real datasets of the road network and bus stops in the city of Belo Horizonte were used. Results indicate the effort required by the city's transit system to provide transit pickup and drop-off points in a reasonable quantity and location, in order to improve the quality of the service rendered to the population.