The study of a dynamic dial-a-ride problem under time-dependent and stochastic environments

This paper studies a dynamic dial-a-ride problem bearing complex constraints on a time-dependent network. A flexible scheduling scheme is proposed to dynamically cope with different stochastic events, such as the travelling time fluctuation, new requests, absences of customers, vehicle breakdowns, cancellations of requests, traffic jams and so on. A fast heuristic is proposed to re-optimize the schedule when a new event occurs. This heuristic consists of a properly organized local search strategy and uses a secondary objective function to drive the search out of local optima. Intensive computational simulations were carried out to evaluate the performance of this scheduling scheme and the influence of different stochastic factors. The simulation results of different scenarios with different percentage of dynamic requests reveal that this scheduling scheme can generate high quality schedules and is capable of coping with various stochastic events.