Indexing approach for delivery demands with time constraints

Abstract

Demand-bus system is focused as a new transportation system. Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (DVRPTW) we address is a simple environment model for demand-bus system. In the problem, delivery demands with time constraints occur enduringly. Share-ride vehicles transport customers to their destination. In order to solve this problem, we propose CRTPR-Tree which indexes moving vehicles on a road network. A node of the tree consists of a pointer to vehicle (in leaf nodes) or pointers to child nodes (in intermediate nodes), a bounding rectangle, and a time constraint. Moreover, we propose two scheduling algorithms based on time traveling measure (TTM) or time constraint measure (TCM) for delivery orders of customers. We performed experiments with the profitability and the usability on an ideal environment. The experimental results show that our approach produces good effects. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.