A Transportation Model For Demand Responsive Fleet Operation In A Manufacturing Firm

Abstract

We study the problem of determining the number of vehicles needed to provide a demand responsive transit service with a predetermined quality for the user in terms of waiting time at the stops and maximum allowed detour. We propose a probabilistic model that requires only the knowledge of the distribution of the demand over the service area and the quality of the service in terms of time windows associated with pickup and delivery nodes. This methodology can be much more effective and straight forward compared to a simulation approach whenever detailed data on demand patterns are not available. Computational results under a fairly broad range of test problems show that the model can provide an estimation of the required size of the fleet in several different scenarios.