Online Vehicle Routing: The Edge of Optimization in Large-Scale Applications

© 2019 INFORM. With the emergence of ride-sharing companies that offer transportation on demand at a large scale and the increasing availability of corresponding demand data sets, new challenges arise to develop routing optimization algorithms that can solve massive problems in real time. In this pa...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bertsimas, Dimitris, Jaillet, Patrick, Martin, Sébastien
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Operations Research Center
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/135142
Description
Summary:© 2019 INFORM. With the emergence of ride-sharing companies that offer transportation on demand at a large scale and the increasing availability of corresponding demand data sets, new challenges arise to develop routing optimization algorithms that can solve massive problems in real time. In this paper, we develop an optimization framework, coupled with a novel and generalizable backbone algorithm, that allows us to dispatch in real time thousands of taxis serving more than 25,000 customers per hour. We provide evidence from historical simulations using New York City routing network and yellow cab data to show that our algorithms improve upon the performance of existing heuristics in such real-world settings.