An Application of Adapted A* Decentralized Approach for On Demand Transportation Problem

Abstract

In recent years, the "on demand transport-ODT" systems are increasingly popular in many cities around the world. An ODT system is defined by three components: the infrastructure of the city, the vehicles and the clients requests. Clients formulate requests for transportation between a pickup and a drop off places. These requests must be served on time by satisfying a set of constraints. We propose a new approach to resolve ODT problem as a multi-agent distributed planning problem. Our model reduces the exponential complexity of the problem, when solved by a decentralized approach based on A* algorithm, to be polynomial. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of our approach to have a real-time scale up system. Our mutli-agent model is a strong first step to have a realistic ODT system taking into account environment and transport infrastructure conditions.

Smart Method for Self-Organization in Last-Mile Parcel Delivery

“…Next the vehicles negotiate with each other to find out which vehicle is best suited to fulfill the request. El Falou et al ( 29 ) build on this idea by introducing an adapted route-planning algorithm reducing computational efforts. They propose two additional vehicle negotiation strategies, reducing the number of messages exchanged between the agents.…”