| Human service organizations offer numerous programs for such groups as preschool children, handicapped and elderly persons, etc. Because the majority of the clientele from these agencies are unable to operate or to afford an automobile, the effectiveness of the programs offered is dependent upon the availability of transportation for the participants. Currently, most organizations at the local level offer transportation services independently of one another. This practice has resulted in a duplication of services which could be reduced if local agencies that offer similar programs would coordinate their transportation systems.;Presented in this study are the two coordinated transportation systems mentioned above: (1) the coordinated transportation system (CTS) with the Santa Clara delivery method and (2) the CTS with exchange depots. The methodology was designed to achieve the following goals: (1) to develop, test, and evaluate integer linear programming (ILP) models for the two coordinated transportation systems, (2) to illustrate the financial benefits gained from implementing either CTS rather than operating independent transportation systems, and (3) to illustrate which CTS is more efficient given the distance between the agencies in the network.;The results of this study indicate that for a two agency/two vehicle system network, either of the two coordinated transportation systems is far more cost efficient than a system of independently operated systems. The expected savings that two agencies could achieve by coordinating their resources ranges from ;Techniques designed for the development of efficient human transportation systems have been the subject of many research papers in the field of Management Science. A major limitation found in the literature is the focus on transportation systems in which the vehicles carry pure loads. Although two coordinated transportation systems have been suggested in previous studies, the methodologies for implementing such systems are not complete. |
