An Online Personal Rapid Transit Dispatching Algorithm Based on Nearest Neighbor Dispatching Rule

Abstract

Personal rapid transit (PRT) is a new transportation system, which is energy efficient and brings high quality of customer service. Customers arrive dynamically at stations and request transportation service. In this paper, we propose a new online PRT dispatching algorithm for pickup and delivery of customers. We adopt the nearest neighbor dispatching rule, which is known as performing well in general. We extend the rule with bipartite matching in order to deal with multiple vehicles and customers at the same time. We suggest a systematic way for selecting vehicles that will be considered to be dispatched, since the scope with which vehicles are selected may affect the system performance. We regard the empty travel distance of vehicles and the customer waiting time as the performance measures. By using simulation experiments, it has been examined that the scope of dispatching affects the system performance. The proposed algorithm has been validated by comparing with other dispatching rules for transportation services. We have shown that our algorithm is more suitable for PRT operating environment than other dispatching rules.