Synchronous Routing for Personal Rapid Transit Pods

Journal Article

Mrad, Mehdi . 2014

• Magazine \ Newspaper: Journal of Applied Mathematics, Special Issue: Recent Advances on Mathematical Modeling and Control Methods for Complex Vehicle Systems
• Issue Number: doi: 10.1155/2014/623849
• Volume Number: 2014

Publication Abstract

Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) is a public and automated transport system in which a fleet of small driverless vehicles operate in order to transport passengers between a set of stations through a network of guided ways. Each customer is carried from one station to another directly with no stop in intermediate stations. This mode of transport can result in a high level of unused capacity due to the empty moves of the vehicles. In this paper, we model the problem of minimizing the energy consumed by the PRT system while assuming pre-deterministic list of orders then we solve it using some constructive heuristics. Experiments are run on 1320 randomly-generated test problems with various sizes. Our algorithms are shown to give good results over large trip instances.

Keywords : Personal Rapid Transit, Routing, Constructive Heuristics.