Goal programming approach for carrying people with physical disabilities

Abstract

Most of today's optimization efforts aim to reduce costs, time or the number of resources used. However, optimization efforts should consider other factors as important as these, such as facilitating the lives of the disabled, elderly and pregnant and helping them in their daily lives. In this study, the Nuh Naci Yazgan (NNY) University (Kayseri/Turkey) personnel transport prob-lems were discussed. The NNY University provides a shuttle service to bring employees to school at the start of the work and to leave them at home after work. In order to shorten the collection / distribution time and the total distance travelled, the service vehicle does not leave / pick up all employees in front of their homes. Instead, the employees are picked up / dropped at appropriate locations on an intuitively determined route. Since only the time and cost savings are taken into account when de-termining the service route, some employees have a long walking distance to the service route. This creates a very important problem, especially for the disabled and pregnant workers. In this study, a new mathematical model is proposed which takes into consideration the physical disadvantages and occupational positions of the employees in order to determine the shortest vehicle route. The results show that the proposed model can significantly reduce walking distances of physically disabled people without compromising the total distance travelled by the vehicle.