The Bi-objective Electric Autonomous Dial-a-Ride Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel bi-objective framework for electric autonomous dial-a-ride problems, optimizing routing and user ride time simultaneously, and demonstrates its effectiveness through computational experiments and benchmarking.

Contribution

The paper develops a new exact fragment-based checker framework for bi-objective E-ADARP, enhancing solution efficiency and quality over existing methods.

Findings

21 out of 38 instances solved optimally

Small-to-medium instances solved within seconds

High-quality Pareto frontiers approximated for large instances

Abstract

The electric autonomous dial-a-ride problem (E-ADARP) introduces electric, autonomously driving vehicles and their unique requirements into the classic dial-a-ride problem, where people are transported between pickup and drop-off locations. Next to an electric autonomous vehicle fleet, in the literature, a weighted-sum objective function, which combines the classic routing cost-oriented objective with a user-oriented objective function, has usually been considered. The user-oriented objective function minimizes the total excess user ride time. In this work, we treat them as two separate objective functions, which are optimized concurrently. In order to address the resulting bi-objective E-ADARP, we develop a novel exact framework (called fragment-based checker), whose core part is a smart ``select-and-check" algorithm that iteratively constructs feasible solutions using fragments. Several enhancements are proposed to enforce the computational efficiency of the proposed method. In the computational experiments, we evaluate several variants of our checker algorithm by leveraging a previously developed branch-and-price algorithm. We benchmark the checker-based framework against state-of-the-art criterion space frameworks as well as a generalized branch-and-price algorithm. Numerical results on both bi-objective DARP and E-ADARP instances demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. With our proposed approaches, 21 out of 38 instances are solved optimally, where small-to-medium-sized instances are solved within seconds. On larger-scale instances, especially those requiring high battery end levels are computationally challenging to solve, our approaches provide high-quality approximations of the Pareto frontiers. Efficient solutions with varying energy restrictions are compared and we obtain valuable managerial insights for different kinds of service providers.