Research Article
Simulation of a large scale dynamic pickup and delivery problem
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/ICST.SIMUTOOLS2010.8701, author={Esa Hyyti\aa{} and Lauri H\aa{}me and Aleksi Penttinen and Reijo Sulonen}, title={Simulation of a large scale dynamic pickup and delivery problem}, proceedings={3rd International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques}, publisher={ICST}, proceedings_a={SIMUTOOLS}, year={2010}, month={5}, keywords={Vehicle routing dial-a-ride problem}, doi={10.4108/ICST.SIMUTOOLS2010.8701} }- Esa Hyytiä
Lauri Häme
Aleksi Penttinen
Reijo Sulonen
Year: 2010
Simulation of a large scale dynamic pickup and delivery problem
SIMUTOOLS
ICST
DOI: 10.4108/ICST.SIMUTOOLS2010.8701
Abstract
We study a variant of dynamic vehicle routing problem with pickups and deliveries where a vehicle is allocated to each service (i.e., trip) request immediately upon the arrival of the request. Solutions to this problem can be characterized as dynamic policies that define how each customer is handled by operating a fleet of vehicles. Evaluation of such policies is beyond the grasp of analytical studies and requires extensive simulations. We present an efficient and modular simulation tool developed for studying the performance of a large scale system with different policies under given trip arrival process. Numerical and analytical observations on the model are utilized to provide guidelines for solving the routing problem efficiently, and to support the validation of the simulation results. Application of the developed framework is demonstrated by several numerical examples, e.g., policy parameter optimization, which all give insight on the viability of this type of transportation system.
