A Two-Level Location Allocation and a Static Dial-a-Ride Problem

EasyChair Preprint 9467

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the two-level modelling of the service set-up planning of a logistic service provider company. The problem discussed in this work is a combination of location allocation problem and a static dial-a-ride problem. The objective of the upper level decision maker is to decide the location of customer service centres in a city that maximizes the service coverage area and are located at prime locations in the city. The problem at the lower level comprises of a set of pickup locations and a corresponding set of drop locations for a given set of customers. The objective of the lower level decision maker is to design routes in such a way that satisfies the needs of all the customers in the network (picking them up from pickup locations and dropping them off at their corresponding drop locations) without violating the constraints. The transportation service at second level is carried out by vehicles providing shared service. The problem consists of designing a set of minimum-cost vehicle routes satisfying vehicle routes satisfying capacity, precedence and pairing constraints. In this work, a solution methodology based on the combination of K-means algorithm and nearest neighbour approach is proposed to solve the proposed problem. The problem finds its application in door-to-door transportation for elderly and disabled people. The problem can also be used by private sharing cab provider companies to generate efficient routes for a given set of customers. To present the applicability of the proposed method, computational experiments are performed on randomly generated small to medium sized instances.

Keyphrases: Dial-a-Ride Problems, Location allocation problem., Transportation and logistics, clustering algorithms, network

@booklet{EasyChair:9467,
  author    = {Kirti Sharma and Vishnu Singh and Debjani Chakraborty},
  title     = {A Two-Level Location Allocation and a Static Dial-a-Ride Problem},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 9467},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2022}}