Distributed planning for the on-line dial-a-ride problem

Abstract

This paper describes the experiments and results obtained from distributing an improved insertion heuristic for the scheduling of passengers' trip requests over a fleet of vehicles. The distribution has been obtained by means of an agent architecture implemented over Jade. Agents make use of the contractnet protocol as base coordination mechanism for the planning and scheduling of passenger trips. In particular, this paper focuses on the insertion heuristic implementation details within the agent-based architecture and its performance in diverse distributed scenarios when varying the number of hosts. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.