Revision with unchanged content. 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 metho-dology 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.
