Dynamic approach for a demand responsive transport service

Demand Responsive Transport is a flexible transportation service that provides transport on demand by a fleet of vehicles, being especially useful in sparsely inhabited areas, which deal with a lack of transportation service. Users formulate requests specifying desired locations and times of pickup and delivery. Given a set of requests, the vehicle routes are to be planned and scheduled in order to minimize both the number of vehicles used and the journey durations, while respecting a set of constraints imposed by the service, the passengers and the vehicles. In a dynamic environment, requests arrive gradually along the day, and the routes must be adjusted in real time to accommodate the new demand. In this work we propose an approach that simulates a dynamic service using mixed linear programming models to produce good solutions. The obtained results for a set of instances are significative when compared to a static approach.