Vehicle Allocation And Scheduling Based On Vehicle Coordination For Pickup & Delivery Service Of Customers To Airport

With market economy developing quickly and social living standards advancing gradually, people not only consider fast and convenient transportation but also pay attention to comfort and satisfaction of travel when travelling. This leads more and more people to choose the fast and convenient air travel. The Flight Tickets Sales Agency (FTSA) is a kind of service-oriented companies selling tickets for airlines. In recent years, the market competition continuously increases and these companies all bring forth some additional services to attract customers. The pickup and delivery service of customers to the airport is one of these services.The Vehicle Scheduling Problem for Air-passenger (VSPA) is an extension application of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). It belongs to the Vehicle Allocation and Scheduling Problem (VASP) which is a typical optimization problem. However, the current VSPA researches do not take into account coordination between vehicles. To save the cost in the actual vehicle scheduling, FTSC often uses vehicle collaboration to pickup customers.As a part of the projects financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61273204), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (No.20120042110023), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (NO.90204001), this dissertation studies several optimization problems of VASP based on vehicle coordination. The major researches in this dissertation contain six aspects as follows:(1) According to the characteristics of the pickup and delivery service of customers to the airport, several typical vehicle coordinations and isolated customer points are defined and the corresponding describtion methods are also proposed. The customers'satisfaction degree function with vehicle coordination is presented. Then we perform the highly detailed discussion and analysis.(2) Taking the minimum mileage as the objective and considering customers' satisfaction degree and vehicles' circumvention, this dissertation proposes a two-stage heuristic algorithm based on vehicle coordination. In the first stage, after the customer points are clustered to produce basic routes according to time windows, preliminary isolated customer points are produced by taking vehicles'circumvention into consideration. Then the customer points are clustered again and the last remaining customer points are identified as isolated customer points. In the second stage, the vehicle coordination is used to optimize the initial solution attained in the first stage. Then the coordination vehicle routes are produced. Finally, several study cases are exploited to perform experimental analysis. Simulation results indicate that the proposed approach of vehicle coordination is feasible and effective.(3) Based on the two-stage heuristic algorithm with vehicle coordination, the set-partition model is established for the pickup and delivery of customers to the airport. Then a heuristic based on the set-partition and vehicle coordination is developed for the small-scale pickup and delivery service of customers to the airport. Lastly, several experiments are conducted to validate our algoritm. Simulation results show our algorithm is effective to the small-scale study cases.(4) Due to the fact that FTSA can concurrently use both cars and small (and medium) buses, we extend the single type of vehicles to mixed type of vehicles to study the Fleet Size and Mix VASP (FSMVASP) with small cars and small (and medium) buses. The cooperative scheduling model, which takes the minimum total driving mileages as the objective, is built. According to the characteristics of this model, a heuristic optimization algorithm is proposed to solve it. After pre-planning the basic routes, this approach finds out the isolated points. Then we take into account the cooperative patterns between isolated points and basic routes, between remaining routes and basic routes cooperating with isolated points, and between final remaining routes, respectively. The vehicle scheduling scheme for the mixed type of vehicles is obtained. Finally, numerical experiments show that the proposed cooperative scheduling model and optimization algorithm are promising and can effectively reduce the operation cost in the pickup and delivery service of customers to the airport.(5) Because the pickup and delivery service of customers to the airport often holds small capacity and short trip transportation task, we investigate the Multi-trip Vehicle Allocation and Scheduling Problem (MVASP) with vehicle cooordination. A three-stage algorithm heuristic based on vehicle cooordination is proposed to solve the problem. In the First stage, the basic vehicle route set and isolated point set are generated. In the second stage, the basic vehicle trip-chains are generated via the arriving time requirement. In the third stage, we find out the coordination points and build the coordination vehicle trip-chains. Simulation experiments comparatively analyze the non-coordination and coordination for the multiple trips. The simulation results show the proposed algorithm can effectively decrease the operation cost of companies. Finally, we further analyze the vehicle coordination for both single and multiple trips. Our numerical experiments can effectively provide the theorical support for FTSA's choosing the appropriate transportation modes.(6) The vehicle owned and rental modes are studied and a mathematical model with minimum cost is established for them. A heuristic algorithm is proposed to overcome it. Our algorithm firstly takes in consideration the constraints and attains the solution with the minimum number of allocated basic vehicles to this model. Then the coordination vehicles are exploited to deliver the customers at the isolated points and the basic vehicle routes are optimized. Several study cases are used to analyze our approach. Simulation results indicate the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed model and algorithm.