An Enhanced Approach for the Dial a ride problem with drivers preferences

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method for the Dial-A-Ride problem that incorporates driver preferences, using both exact MILP solutions and a heuristic approach, demonstrating efficient problem-solving in reasonable time.

Contribution

It presents a novel driver-oriented variant of the Dial-A-Ride problem and develops an efficient heuristic framework alongside exact solutions.

Findings

Heuristic approach solves instances efficiently.

Exact MILP provides optimal solutions.

Numerical experiments validate the methods' effectiveness.

Abstract

The paper addresses a variant of the Dial-A-Ride problem with additional features. It is referred to as the DARP with driver preferences, which attempts to determine a solution more driver-oriented by designing a short trip in a specific direction that has to be finished at a destination of interest within a restricted time window. For this purpose, two solutions are considered. The first involves solving the new MILP exactly using the CPLEX software. The second is a new approach that employs an iterated local search as a general framework and exploits many heuristics. Numerical experiments indicate that the approach can efficiently solve the generated DARPDP instances in a reasonable time.