Minimising average passenger waiting time in personal rapid transit systems

Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) is an emerging urban transport mode. A PRT system operates much like a conventional hackney taxi system, except that the vehicles are driven by computer (no human driver) between stations in a dedicated network of guideways. The world’s first two PRT systems began operating in 2010 and 2011. In both PRT and taxi systems, passengers request immediate service; they do not book ahead. Perfect information about future requests is therefore not available, but statistical information about future requests is available from historical data. If the system does not use this statistical information to position empty vehicles in anticipation of future requests, long passenger waiting times result, which makes the system less attractive to passengers, but using it gives rise to a difficult stochastic optimisation problem. This paper develops three lower bounds on achievable mean passenger waiting time, one based on queuing theory, one based on the static problem, in which it is assumed that perfect information is available, and one based on a Markov Decision Process model. An evaluation of these lower bounds, together with a practical heuristic developed previously, in simulation shows that these lower bounds can often be nearly attained, particularly when the fleet size is large. The results also show that low waiting times and high utilisation can be simultaneously obtained when the fleet size is large, which suggests important economies of scale.     

Exploring express delivery networks in China based on complex network theory

Based on the complex network theory, we explore an express delivery system in China, which consists of two delivery networks, namely, the air delivery network (ADN) and the ground delivery network (GDN). Systematic structural analysis indicates that both delivery networks exhibit small‐world phenomenon, disassortative mixing behavior, and rich‐club phenomenon. However, there are significant differences between ADN and GDN in terms of degree distribution property and community structure. On the basis of the Barabási‐Albert model, we have proposed a network model incorporating the structural features of the two delivery networks to reveal their evolutionary mechanisms. Lastly, the parcel strength and the distance strength are analyzed, which, respectively, reflect the number of parcels and the long‐haul delivery distance handled by a node city. The strengths are highly heterogeneous in both delivery networks and have intense correlations with topological structures. These works are beneficial for express enterprises to construct or extend their express delivery networks, and provide some useful insights on improving parcel delivery service. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity 21: 166–179, 2015     

Advanced routing for city logistics service providers based on time-dependent travel times

Increasing traffic demand, recurring congestion and sophisticated e-commerce business models lead to enormous challenges for routing in city logistics. We introduce a planning system for city logistics service providers, which faces those challenges by more realistic vehicle routing considering time-dependent travel times. Time-dependent travel times arise from telematics-based traffic data collection city-wide. Well-known heuristics for the Traveling Salesman Problem and for the Vehicle Routing Problem are adapted to time-dependent planning data. Computational experiments allow for insights into the efficiency of individual heuristics, their adaptability to time-dependent planning data sets, and the quality and structure of resulting delivery tours.     

A parallel matheuristic for the technician routing and scheduling problem

The Technician Routing and Scheduling Problem (TRSP) consists in routing staff to serve requests for service, taking into account time windows, skills, tools, and spare parts. Typical applications include maintenance operations and staff routing in telecoms, public utilities, and in the health care industry. In this paper, we present a formal definition of the TRSP, discuss its relation with the Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (VRPTW), and review related research. From a methodological perspective, we describe a matheuristic composed of a constructive heuristic, a parallel Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search, and a mathematical programming based post-optimization procedure that successfully tackles the TRSP. We validate the matheuristic on the Solomon VRPTW instances, where we achieve an average gap of $0.23\,\%$ , and matched 44 out of 55 optimal solutions. Finally, we illustrate how the matheuristic successfully solves a set of TRSP instances extended from the Solomon benchmark.     

二级物流服务供应链的契约协调机制研究

研究一个物流服务集成商和一个物流服务提供商所组成的二级物流服务供应链的系统协调问题。分别建立了集中控制模型、批发价格契约下的Stackelberg主从协调模型、收益共享契约下的协调模型,得到不同协调方法下的最优解所满足的条件。通过模型间的对比,证明了收益共享契约可使得该物流服务供应链达到整体最优的状态,相对于批发价格契约,实现了Pareto改进。最后,用数值试验的方式进一步验证了收益共享契约在协调物流服务供应链运作的有效性。     

Waiting times for M/M systems under state-dependent processor sharing

We consider a system where the arrivals form a Poisson process and the required service times of the requests are exponentially distributed. The requests are served according to the state-dependent (Cohen’s generalized) processor sharing discipline, where each request in the system receives a service capacity which depends on the actual number of requests in the system. For this system we derive systems of ordinary differential equations for the LST and for the moments of the conditional waiting time of a request with given required service time as well as a stable and fast recursive algorithm for the LST of the second moment of the conditional waiting time, which in particular yields the second moment of the unconditional waiting time. Moreover, asymptotically tight upper bounds for the moments of the conditional waiting time are given. The presented numerical results for the first two moments of the sojourn times in M/M/m?PS systems show that the proposed algorithms work well.     

Using different response-time requirements to smooth time-varying demand for service

Many service systems have demand that varies significantly by time of day, making it costly to provide sufficient capacity to be able to respond very quickly to each service request. Fortunately, however, different service requests often have very different response-time requirements. Some service requests may need immediate response, while others can tolerate substantial delays. Thus it is often possible to smooth demand by partitioning the service requests into separate priority classes according to their response-time requirements. Classes with more stringent performance requirements are given higher priority for service. Lower capacity may be required if lower-priority-class demand can be met during off-peak periods. We show how the priority classes can be defined and the resulting required fixed capacity can be determined, directly accounting for the time-dependent behavior. For this purpose, we exploit relatively simple analytical models, in particular, M_t/G/∞ and deterministic offered-load models. The analysis also provides an estimate of the capacity savings that can be obtained from partitioning time-varying demand into priority classes.     

The Clustered Orienteering Problem

In this paper we study a generalization of the Orienteering Problem (OP) which we call the Clustered Orienteering Problem (COP). The OP, also known as the Selective Traveling Salesman Problem, is a problem where a set of potential customers is given and a profit is associated with the service of each customer. A single vehicle is available to serve the customers. The objective is to find the vehicle route that maximizes the total collected profit in such a way that the duration of the route does not exceed a given threshold. In the COP, customers are grouped in clusters. A profit is associated with each cluster and is gained only if all customers belonging to the cluster are served. We propose two solution approaches for the COP: an exact and a heuristic one. The exact approach is a branch-and-cut while the heuristic approach is a tabu search. Computational results on a set of randomly generated instances are provided to show the efficiency and effectiveness of both approaches.     

多类型公共自行车调运问题

公共自行车是我国正大力发展的低碳交通出行模式,加强公共自行车调运优化是提升自行车出行吸引力的关键要素。通过对公共自行车调运背景分析,提出了一类多类型公共自行车的调运优化问题。针对现实生活中租赁站点内公共自行车不均衡的情况,建立了以总成本最小为目标的混合整数线性规划模型,并提出一种改进的混合禁忌搜索对问题进行求解。通过数值实验分析了问题特性并验证了算法性能。实验结果表明非均衡惩罚系数决定了租赁站点各类自行车的装卸载数量,并影响了调配车辆的运行路线,是实现多类型公共自行车均衡优化的关键因素。不同类型自行车的替代策略使得调运决策更加灵活。混合禁忌搜索可以求解更大规模的问题,并能在短时间内求得较好质量的解。     

城市交通管理中的出租车规划3

根据城市的发展情况以及类比其他城市的发展状况,对城市交通出行情况建立模型,对城市出租车的数量及乘坐人口做出预测;并针对目前的油价上涨给出租车行业带来的收入问题做出分析;建立最优化问题对驾驶员和顾客的满意进行描述,最终给出合理的价格调整方案.     

A multidimensional approach to urban quality of life: The case of Istanbul

The purpose of this paper is to model the priorities, expectations and needs of the inhabitants of Istanbul, a city with a population of about 10 million, from a multidimensional perspective. In this way, effective allocation of the city’s resources can be achieved to improve the quality of life (QOL) for such a large number of people, which is the primary concern of the local authorities as well as the urban planners. For this reason, a survey is conducted in Istanbul so that the priorities of the inhabitants are revealed and the city where they would like to live is portrayed. The data obtained are used as input for hierarchical conjoint analysis. The survey is primarily based on the evaluation of hypothetical, experimentally designed city profiles for four different constructs on a 0–10 rating scale. The relative importance of the constructs is estimated through the eigenvector approach. The research is an interdisciplinary group work acting as a bridge between urban planning and multiattribute decision making; thus judgements of experts from different disciplines are used in every stage of the study.     

基于Prosumer的互联网农业分享经济模型

构建分散小农户合作化联合,碎片化消费者社群化聚合,消费者充分参与生产端消费体验并与生产者融合为Prosumer的互联网农业共享经济模型.研究表明,消费者社群化聚合,生产者合作化联合,消费者与生产者融合为生产消费者是互联网农业分享经济有效实现形式,可促进供应链信息对称,产销对接和交易成本降低,提升农产品质量安全水平和消费者对国内农产品质量安全的信心."土地托管","乡村货的"和"俺家特供"是当前我国农业分享经济在生产,流通和消费端出现的典型案例,它们的融合发展必将成为我国互联网农业分享经济发展的主要方向.     

Vehicle routing with multiple deliverymen: Modeling and heuristic approaches for the VRPTW

In real life distribution of goods, relatively long service times may make it difficult to serve all requests during regular working hours. These difficulties are even greater if the beginning of the service in each demand site must occur within a time window and violations of routing time restrictions are particularly undesirable. We address this situation by considering a variant of the vehicle routing problem with time windows for which, besides routing and scheduling decisions, a number of extra deliverymen can be assigned to each route in order to reduce service times. This problem appears, for example, in the distribution of beverage and tobacco in highly dense Brazilian urban areas. We present a mathematical programming formulation for the problem, as well as a tabu search and an ant colony optimization heuristics for obtaining minimum cost routes. The performance of the model and the heuristic approaches are evaluated using instances generated from a set of classic examples from the literature.     

A differentiated service scheme to optimize website revenues

We consider a website host server with web quality of service (QoS) capabilities to offer differentiated services. A quantitative modelling framework is set up to analyse the economic benefits of differentiated services and to build optimization models for managing the website host's connection bandwidth to the Internet (which is assumed to be the bottleneck factor determining the QoS). Three models are formulated corresponding to three operational scenarios to provide differentiated services. The first is for the marketing manager to classify visit requests as premium or basic when the information technology (IT) manager has already reserved bandwidths for the two classes, and the second is for the IT manager to allocate the total available bandwidth to each class when the marketing manager has already designated which visit requests are premium and which are basic. The third is for the joint optimization of request classification and bandwidth allocation when centralized coordination is possible. Analytic results are obtained for a special case that corresponds to very impatient customers requesting large amounts of data. Qualitative insights gained and numerical results obtained strongly support the implementation of differentiated services. More interestingly, the decentralized models that use simple and rough-cut rules yield solutions almost as good as the joint optimization model.     

A combined statistical approach and ground movement model for improving taxi time estimations at airports

With the expected continued increases in air transportation, the mitigation of the consequent delays and environmental effects is becoming more and more important, requiring increasingly sophisticated approaches for airside airport operations. Improved on-stand time predictions (for improved resource allocation at the stands) and take-off time predictions (for improved airport-airspace coordination) both require more accurate taxi time predictions, as do the increasingly sophisticated ground movement models which are being developed. Calibrating such models requires historic data showing how long aircraft will actually take to move around the airport, but recorded data usually includes significant delays due to contention between aircraft. This research was motivated by the need to both predict taxi times and to quantify and eliminate the effects of airport load from historic taxi time data, since delays and re-routing are usually explicitly considered in ground movement models. A prediction model is presented here that combines both airport layout and historic taxi time information within a multiple linear regression analysis, identifying the most relevant factors affecting the variability of taxi times for both arrivals and departures. The promising results for two different European hub airports are compared against previous results for US airports.     

An equilibrium model for urban transit assignment based on game theory

The urban public transport system is portrayed as a special commodity market where passenger is consumer, transit operator is producer and the special goods is the service for passenger’s trip. The generalized Nash equilibrium game is applied to describe how passengers adjust their route choices and trip modes. We present a market equilibrium model for urban public transport system as a series of mathematical programmings and equations, which is to describe both the competitions among different transit operators and the interactive influences among passengers. The proposed model can simultaneously predict how passengers choose their optimal routes and trip modes. An algorithm is designed to obtain the equilibrium solution. Finally, a simple numerical example is given and some conclusions are drawn.     

Comparison of policies in dynamic routing problems

We consider a company that has to satisfy customers' pick-up requests arriving over time every day. The overall objective of the company is to serve as many requests as possible at a minimum operational cost. When organizing its business the company has to fix some features of the service that may affect both service quality and operational costs. Some of these features concern the time a request is taken into account to plan its service, the associated deadline and the way requests are managed when the system is overloaded. In this paper we analyse several policies that can be implemented by the management of a carrier company in a multi-period context. For example, a company might reject all the requests that cannot be feasibly scheduled or accept all the requests and rely on a backup service in order to serve requests that are difficult to handle. Another interesting issue considered in this paper is the impact of collaborative service where two or more carrier companies, with their own customers, decide to share customers in order to optimize the overall costs. We set up a general framework to allow comparison of alternative service policies. Extensive computational results evaluating the number of lost requests and the distance travelled provide interesting insights.     

A truck scheduling problem arising in intermodal container transportation

We address a truck scheduling problem that arises in intermodal container transportation, where containers need to be transported between customers (shippers or receivers) and container terminals (rail or maritime) and vice versa. The transportation requests are handled by a trucking company which operates several depots and a fleet of homogeneous trucks that must be routed and scheduled to minimize the total truck operating time under hard time window constraints imposed by the customers and terminals. Empty containers are considered as transportation resources and are provided by the trucking company for freight transportation. The truck scheduling problem at hand is formulated as Full-Truckload Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (FTPDPTW) and is solved by a 2-stage heuristic solution approach. This solution method was specially designed for the truck scheduling problem but can be applied to other problems as well. We assess the quality of our solution approach on several computational experiments.     

唐家山堰塞湖泄洪的理论模型及数值模拟

针对2008年全国研究生数学建模竞赛A题,研究和解决汶川地震中唐家山堰塞湖的泄洪问题.建立了唐家山堰塞湖的蓄水量模型、溃坝模型、洪水演进模型和人员调度模型等理论模型,并给出了这些模型的精确数值模拟.模拟结果显示,提出的模型具有较高的精度,依据该模型提出的调度方案能够合理解决泄洪时的人员撤离问题,具有重要的参考意义.