The problems treated in this book are very simple in nature: how to
route n vehicles in real time in a fast varying environment to pickup
and deliver m passengers when both n and m are large? These problems are
very relevant to future transportation options involving large scale
real-time routing of shared-ride fleet transit vehicles. But, even if
the nature of these problems looks so simple, solving them is not so
straight forward, specially finding fast and reliable solutions.
Traditionally, dynamic routing solutions were found as static
approximations for smaller-scale problems or using local heuristics for
the larger-scale ones. Generally heuristics used for these types of
problems do not consider global optimality. This work develops a
hierarchical methodology to solve these types of problems in three
stages seeking global optimality. The book first introduces the problems
treated, secondly presents the main characteristics of the proposed
methodology, followed by insights on each of the proposed stages. Then a
general framework to use the proposed methodology for any vehicle
routing problem is presented. Finally, a real application is presented.
The work is addressed to professionals and researchers working on
vehicle routing and network optimization issues.