Operations Research 2025
Abstract Submission

2350. Optimising Dial-a-Ride Services with Public Transportation Integration Using an Event-Based Formulation

Invited abstract in session WB-1: Ridepooling, stream Mobility, Transportation, and Traffic.

Wednesday, 10:45-12:15
Room: Audimax

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Lorenz Alexander Saathoff
Institute for Operations Research, Universität Hamburg
2. Arne Schulz
Institute of Quantitative Logistics, Helmut Schmidt University

Abstract

Demand-responsive transport services have become more popular in recent years. The Integrated Dial-a-Ride Problem (I-DARP) describes the optimisation problem of determining vehicle routes serving customers in an area around a station while respecting their desired connection to timetable-based public transport. Passengers are allowed to request a ride either from or to the station. Conventionally, the DARP is modelled using time-space formulations which represent the customer locations as nodes. However, recently, the focus has shifted towards event-based approaches, representing the DARP as a sequence of events, thus enhancing computational performance.
Following this line of research, an event-based formulation for the public transport-integrated Dial-a-Ride problem is proposed. This formulation captures the problem's unique properties, including many-to-one routing and coincident requested arrival/departure times at the public transport stop due to the embedded timetable. By explicitly modelling the boarding and alighting events, numerous restrictions pertaining to vehicle capacity, request pairing, and precedence constraints are adhered to in the construction of the event graph.
A mixed-integer program for finding optimal routes is proposed and solved for two objectives: (1) minimise passenger inconvenience in terms of waiting time and (2) minimise total distance travelled by the vehicles. The results are compared and managerial implications are derived and discussed. The computational experiments on realistic instances are also used to evaluate the performance of the event-based formulation for the I-DARP.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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