Bi-objective optimization model for the heterogeneous dynamic dial-a-ride problem with no rejects.

Abstract

This work proposes a bi-objective mathematical optimization model and a two-stage heuristic for a real-world application of the heterogeneous Dynamic Dial-a-Ride Problem with no rejects, i.e., a patient transportation system. The problem consists of calculating route plans to meet a set of transportation requests by using a given heterogeneous vehicle fleet. These transportation requests can be either static or dynamic, and all of them must be attended to. In the first stage of the proposed heuristic, the problem’s static part is solved by applying a General Variable neighborhood Search based algorithm. In the second stage, the dynamic requests are dealt with by implementing a simple insertion heuristic. We create different instances based on the real data provided by a Brazilian city’s public health care system and test the proposed approach on them. The analysis of the results shows that the higher the level of dynamism, i.e., the number of urgent requests on each instance, the smaller the objective function value will be in the static part. The results also demonstrate that a higher level of dynamism increases the chance of a time window violation happening. Besides, we use the weighted sum method of the two conflicting objectives to analyze the trade-off between them and create an approximation for the Pareto frontier.