A Decentralised Approach for the Transportation On Demand Problem

Abstract

Public transport systems are generally organized in a static, a priori way. In such systems, the demand must be adapted to the offer. In this paper, we propose a model based on self-organization in order to dispatch a fleet of vehicles in a purely dynamic Transportation On Demand system (TOD). Our proposal consists in a decentralized approach and a multi-agent system (MAS) to model the environment. This will tackle the problem of vehicles over-concentration or the lack of service in certain areas of the city. We demonstrate that our model addresses these problems by providing vehicle agents, for a given request, to make the final decision thanks to a negotiation process and to calculate overcosts according to an original insertion heuristic.