I. the origin of species by means of natural selection

There has been a resurgence of interest in demand-responsive shared-ride systems, motivated by concerns for the environment and also new developments in technologies which enable new modes of operations. This paper surveys the research developments on the Dial-A-Ride Problem (DARP) since 2007. We provide a classification of the problem variants and the solution methodologies, and references to benchmark instances. We also present some application areas for the DARP, discuss some future trends and challenges, and indicate some possible directions for future research.

A survey of dial-a-ride problems: Literature review and recent developments

The rise of research into shared mobility systems reflects emerging challenges, such as rising traffic congestion, rising oil prices and rising environmental concern. The operations research community has turned towards more sharable and sustainable systems of transportation. Shared mobility systems can be collapsed into two main streams: Those where people share rides and those where parcel transportation and people transportation are combined. This survey sets out to review recent research in this area, including different optimization approaches, and to provide guidelines and promising directions for future research. It makes a distinction between prearranged and real-time problem settings and their methods of solution, and also gives an overview of real-case applications relevant to the research area.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02014342/document

A survey of models and algorithms for optimizing shared mobility

Dial-a-ride problems consist of designing vehicle routes and time schedules in a system of demand-dependent, collective people transportation In the standard problem, operational costs are minimized, subject to full demand satisfaction and service level requirements However, to enhance the practical applicability of solution methods, authors increasingly focus on problem variants that adopt additional real-life characteristics First, this work introduces an up-to-date classification that distinguishes multiple categories of real-life characteristics Second, the wide range of solution methods proposed in the literature is reviewed in a structured manner Although the existing literature is reviewed exhaustively, specific attention is devoted to recent developments Third, an extensive overview table provides full details on all problem characteristics and solution methods applied in each paper discussed Fourth, lacunae in research conducted to date and opportunities for future work are identified

/pdf/typology-and-literature-review-for-dial-a-ride-problems-3yar94lshd.pdf

Typology and literature review for dial-a-ride problems

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of research on operating room planning and scheduling problems. Aiming to give a comprehensive classification on the studied problems, we review the literature from the perspectives of decision level, scheduling strategy, patient characteristics, problem setting, uncertainty, mathematical models, and solutions and methods. The papers are reviewed in diversified ways so as to obtain a detailed overview in this area, and the fields that need to be focused on are summarized. It shows that mathematical programming and heuristics are frequently applied in the complex linear and combinatorial optimization problems. Furthermore, future research trends and directions on operating room planning and scheduling are also identified.

Operating room planning and surgical case scheduling: a review of literature

A stochastic optimization and simulation approach for scheduling operating rooms and recovery beds in an orthopedic surgery department

A hybrid Genetic Algorithm for the Heterogeneous Dial-A-Ride Problem

This work is partly supported by the University of Sfax and by the Interuniversity Attraction Poles Programme initiated by the Belgian Science Policy Office (research project COMEX, Combinatorial Optimization: Metaheuristics & Exact Methods). The authors would like to thank Professor Jiuh-Biing Sheu and the three anonymous referees for their valuable comments.

/pdf/three-effective-metaheuristics-to-solve-the-multi-depot-50nzv9ktl9.pdf

Three effective metaheuristics to solve the multi-depot multi-trip heterogeneous dial-a-ride problem

Classroom assignment for exam timetabling

In this paper, we investigate a compound of the exam timetabling problems which consists of assigning a set of independent exams to a certain number of classrooms. We can define the exam timetabling problem as the scheduling of exams to time slots in first stage and at a second stage, the assignment of a set of exams extracted from one time slot to some available classrooms. Even though the formulation of this problem looks simple as it contains only two sets of constraints including only binary variables, we show that it belongs to the class of NP hard problems by reduction from the Numerical Matching with Target Sum problems (NMTS). In order to reduce the size of this problem and make it efficiently solvable either by exact method or heuristic approaches, a theorem is rigorously demonstrated and a reduction procedure inspired from the dominance criterion is developed. The two methods contribute in the search for a feasible solution by reducing the size of the original problem without affecting the feasibility. Since the reduction procedures do not usually assign all exams to classrooms, we propose a Variable Neighbourhood Search (VNS) algorithm in order to obtain a good quality complete solution. The objective of VNS algorithm is to reduce the total classroom capacity assigned to exams. A numerical result concerning the exam of the main session of the first semester of the academic year 2009-2010 of the Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences of Sfax shows the good performance of our approach compared with lower bound defined as the sum of the total capacity of all assigned classrooms and the total size of the remaining exams after reduction.

Abdelaziz Dammak

Papers

A stochastic optimization and simulation approach for scheduling operating rooms and recovery beds in an orthopedic surgery department

A hybrid Genetic Algorithm for the Heterogeneous Dial-A-Ride Problem

Three effective metaheuristics to solve the multi-depot multi-trip heterogeneous dial-a-ride problem

Classroom assignment for exam timetabling

The classroom assignment problem: Complexity, size reduction and heuristics