STRATEGIES FOR THE DYNAMIC DIAL-A-RIDE PROBLEM

In the Dial-a-Ride Problem (DARP), passengers specific their transportation requests between origins and destinations with desired departure or arrival time, and the operator is responsible to provide transportation with a fleet of vehicles. The objective of the scheduler is to design a set of routes which minimizes the total service cost, capable of providing service to all requests. Existing approaches on the DARP focus on the static version of the problem. The objective of this paper is to develop an efficient strategy for the dynamic dial-a-ride problem to describe how the operator should response to the requests and manage the vehicles, taking into account the real-time characteristics and stochastic effects. In contrast to the heuristics used in the static problems which emphasize in the routing component, we identify that the core of the strategy in the dynamic approach is in the scheduling component.