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VIPAFLEET is a framework to develop models and algorithms for managing a fleet of Individual Public Autonomous Vehicles (VIPA). We consider a homogeneous fleet of such vehicles distributed at specified stations in a closed site to supply internal transportation, where the vehicles can be used in different modes of circulation (tram mode, elevator mode, taxi mode). We treat in this paper a variant of the Online Pickup-and-Delivery Problem related to the taxi mode by means of multicommodity coupled flows in a time-expanded network and propose a corresponding integer linear programming formulation. This enables us to compute optimal offline solutions. However, to apply the well-known meta-strategy Replan to the online situation by solving a sequence of offline subproblems, the computation times turned out to be too long, so that we devise a heuristic approach h-Replan based on the flow formulation. Finally, we evaluate the performance of h-Replan in comparison with the optimal offline solution, both in terms of competitive analysis and computational experiments, showing that h-Replan computes reasonable solutions, so that it suits for the online situation.
@InProceedings{bsaybes_et_al:LIPIcs.SEA.2018.25,
author = {Bsaybes, Sahar and Quilliot, Alain and Wagler, Annegret K.},
title = {{Fleet Management for Autonomous Vehicles Using Multicommodity Coupled Flows in Time-Expanded Networks}},
booktitle = {17th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms (SEA 2018)},
pages = {25:1--25:14},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-070-5},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {103},
editor = {D'Angelo, Gianlorenzo},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2018.25},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-89600},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SEA.2018.25},
annote = {Keywords: fleet management, offline and online pickup and delivery problem, multicommodity flows}
}