Towards a Testbed for Dynamic Vehicle Routing Algorithms

Abstract

Since modern transport services are becoming more flexible, demand-responsive, and energy/cost efficient, there is a growing demand for large-scale microscopic simulation platforms in order to test sophisticated routing algorithms. Such platforms have to simulate in detail, not only the dynamically changing demand and supply of the relevant service, but also traffic flow and other relevant transport services. This paper presents the DVRP extension to the open-source MATSim simulator. The extension is designed to be highly general and customizable to simulate a wide range of dynamic rich vehicle routing problems. The extension allows plugging in of various algorithms that are responsible for continuous re-optimisation of routes in response to changes in the system. The DVRP extension has been used in many research and commercial projects dealing with simulation of electric and autonomous taxis, demand-responsive transport, personal rapid transport, free-floating car sharing and parking search.

City-wide shared taxis: A simulation study in Berlin

“…For simulation of on-demand transport modes, such as taxi, DRT or SAVs, a set of MATSim extensions have been created [12], [13]. These allow dynamic dispatching of vehicle fleets during simulation in response to incoming requests and other events by means of pluggable algorithms that differ in terms of objectives and constraints.…”

Autonomous Vehicles and their Impact on Parking Search

“…In order to model parking search, as well as other processes that cannot be planned ahead for the whole day, MATSim has been extended with several implementations that allow agents to change their behavior within an iteration. This feature is often referred to as withinday replanning [22], [23] and has extended application of MATSim to a wide range of different use cases, from evaluating evacuation scenarios [24] through modeling congestion effects of city-wide SAV fleets [25] to benchmarking dynamic vehicle routing algorithms [26].…”

“…MATSim comes with a set of extensions to simulate dynamic modes, including shared autonomous vehicles, by allowing dynamic dispatch of vehicles during the simulation runtime, which, just like parking search, is another form of within-day replanning. A detailed overview of these extensions, including a description how to apply and adapt the code, is available in [26]. Developed use cases include simulation of taxi services [29], pooled DRT services [30] and SAVs [11], [17], [31].…”

Potential of Private Autonomous Vehicles for Parcel Delivery

“…In contrast to the standard MATSim approach, different representations of agents and vehicles are required. (16,17,18) Using this approach, vehicles follow a schedule of tasks, which can be grouped in StayTasks (e.g. pickup, dropoff, waiting) and DriveTasks (empty or loaded) (16).…”