Dynamic Vehicle Scheduling for Working Service Network with Dual Demands

• Main Authors: Bing Li, Wei Xu, Hua Xuan, Chunqiu Xu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hindawi-Wiley 2017-01-01
• Series: Journal of Advanced Transportation
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2017/7217309

This study aims to develop some models to aid in making decisions on the combined fleet size and vehicle assignment in working service network where the demands include two types (minimum demands and maximum demands), and vehicles themselves can act like a facility to provide services when they are stationary at one location. This type of problem is named as the dynamic working vehicle scheduling with dual demands (DWVS-DD) and formulated as a mixed integer programming (MIP). Instead of a large integer program, the problem is decomposed into small local problems that are guided by preset control parameters. The approach for preset control parameters is given. By introducing them into the MIP formulation, the model is reformulated as a piecewise form. Further, a piecewise method by updating preset control parameters is proposed for solving the reformulated model. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method produces better solution within reasonable computing time.