Abstract
Demand responsive transportation has the potential to provide efficient public door-to-door transport with a high quality. In currently implemented systems in the Netherlands, however, we observe a decrease in the quality of service (QoS), expressed in longer travel times for the customers. Currently, generally one transport company is responsible for transporting all customers located in a specified geographic zone. In general it is known that when multiple companies compete on costs, the price for customers decreases. In this paper, we investigate whether a similar result can be achieved when competing on quality instead. To arrive at some first conclusions, we set up a multiagent environment to simulate the assignment of rides to companies through an auction on QoS, and the insertion of allocated rides in the companies’ schedules using online optimization. Our results reveal that this set-up improves the quality of the service offered to the customers at moderately higher costs.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Cordeau, J.F.: A branch-and-cut algorithm for the dial-a-ride problem. Operations Research 54, 573–586 (2006)
Karp, R.M.: Reducibility among combinatorial problems. In: Miller, R.E., Thatcher, J.W. (eds.) Complexity of Computer Computations, pp. 85–103. Plenum Press, New York (1972)
Ropke, S., Cordeau, J.F., Laporte, G.: Models and branch-and-cut algorithms for pickup and delivery problems with time windows. Networks 49, 258–272 (2007)
Jaw, J.J., Odoni, A.R., Psaraftis, H.N., Wilson, N.H.M.: A heuristic algorithm for the multi-vehicle advance request dial-a-ride problem with time windows. Transportation Research Part B: Methodological 20, 243–257 (1986)
Mahr, T., Srour, J., de Weerdt, M.M., Zuidwijk, R.: Can agents measure up? a comparative study of an agent-based and on-line optimization approach for a drayage problem with uncertainty. Transportation Research: Part C 18, 99–119 (2010)
Mes, M.: Sequential Auctions for Full Truckload Allocation. PhD thesis, Universiteit Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands (2008)
Solomon, M.: Algorithms for the vehicle routing and scheduling with time window constraints. Operations Research 15, 254–265 (1987)
Metropolis, N., Ulam, S.: The monte carlo method. Journal of the American Statistical Association 44, 335–341 (1949)
Bellifemine, F., Poggi, A., Rimassa, G.: JADE - a FIPA-compliant agent framework. In: Proceedings of the Practical Applications of Intelligent Agents (1999)
Achterberg, T.: SCIP - a framework to integrate constraint and mixed integer programming. Technical Report 4-19, Zuse Institute Berlin (2004)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Grootenboers, F., de Weerdt, M., Zargayouna, M. (2010). Impact of Competition on Quality of Service in Demand Responsive Transit. In: Dix, J., Witteveen, C. (eds) Multiagent System Technologies. MATES 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6251. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16178-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16178-0_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-16177-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-16178-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)