A cooperative scheduling framework for shared transportation services

To improve the efficiency of metropolitan shared transportation services (STS), this paper proposes a cooperative scheduling framework to avoid congestion. Two procedures are considered: shared path scheduling and congestion solving. In a known static traffic network, classic vehicle routing problem (VRP) solutions may obtain an optimal path. But with an increasing number of shared transportation services required, congestion is likely, triggered by open loop VRP scheduling, especially when shared vehicles overwhelm private ones. Dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) solutions could be employed for short-term traffic situation prediction. However, VRP and DTA cannot be combined linearly, due to uncontrolled recursive calls of routing procedures within VRP and DTA. Hence, a software structure is further studied to guarantee convergence of the cooperative framework. Using two open-source transportation packages, VRPLite and DTALite, we test our framework with the Western 3rd Ring Road of the Beijing regional network. Results verify the framework's usability and flexibility.