Improving the Quality of Service Within Multi-objective Customer-Oriented Dial-A-Ride Problems

Abstract

Seeking a trade-off between the service offered to customers and the interests of the system provider is a challenging task within Dial a Ride Problems. A continuous reflection is required especially in the resolution of transport problems focusing on the requirements of the customers. In this paper, we address a customer oriented Dial A Ride Problem which minimizes the total transport costs while improving the quality of service provided to the customers. A multi-objective formulation is proposed in order to minimize the total travel costs and the total waiting times. Real life instances of the problem are solved using the branch and bound method embedded in the CPLEX solver for producing exact solutions of the problems and in the worst cases the lower bounds of the search space.