Operating a Fleet of Electric Taxis
OPERATING A FLEET OF ELECTRIC TAXIS
´ ´ BERNAT GACIAS AND FREDERIC MEUNIER
Abstract. The deployment of electric taxi fleets is highly desirable from a sustainable point of view. Nevertheless, the weak autonomy of this kind of vehicles requires a careful operation. The way of managing such a fleet and the question of locating charging terminals for the vehicles are addressed in this paper. Methods for dealing with these tasks are proposed and their efficiency is proved through simulations.
1. Introduction 1.1. Context. Centrale OO 1 is a pioneering project aiming to deploy in Paris a fleet of 100 % electric taxis. The company in charge of the management of the fleet is the Soci´t´ du Taxi Electrique Parisien (STEP). ee The deployment of such fleets finds is main motivation in sustainable issues: electric vehicles release almost no air pollutants at the place where they are operated and have less noise pollution than internal combustion engine vehicles. However, the main drawback of an electric vehicle is its weak autonomy – 80 km in the case of the Centrale OO project. In taxi fleet management, two kinds of requests can be differentiated: booking requests and opportunistic requests. The first ones can be immediate or in advance of travel and have to be processed by the taxi dispatching system which assigns the request to a taxi. The opportunistic requests correspond to the traditional taxi services picking up passengers at cab-ranks or from the side of the road. Of course, this kind of requests is not processed by the dispatching system. The constraints of the management, as expressed by the STEP, are • A taxi must never break down • An opportunistic demand inside Paris and its suburbs must always be satisfied (legal environment of Paris) • The number of booking demands accepted has to be maximized The charging problem of the taxis must therefore be carefully addressed. At a tactical level, a good assignment of the trips to the taxis is crucial. We propose an efficient way
´ ´ BERNAT GACIAS AND FREDERIC MEUNIER
Abstract. The deployment of electric taxi fleets is highly desirable from a sustainable point of view. Nevertheless, the weak autonomy of this kind of vehicles requires a careful operation. The way of managing such a fleet and the question of locating charging terminals for the vehicles are addressed in this paper. Methods for dealing with these tasks are proposed and their efficiency is proved through simulations.
1. Introduction 1.1. Context. Centrale OO 1 is a pioneering project aiming to deploy in Paris a fleet of 100 % electric taxis. The company in charge of the management of the fleet is the Soci´t´ du Taxi Electrique Parisien (STEP). ee The deployment of such fleets finds is main motivation in sustainable issues: electric vehicles release almost no air pollutants at the place where they are operated and have less noise pollution than internal combustion engine vehicles. However, the main drawback of an electric vehicle is its weak autonomy – 80 km in the case of the Centrale OO project. In taxi fleet management, two kinds of requests can be differentiated: booking requests and opportunistic requests. The first ones can be immediate or in advance of travel and have to be processed by the taxi dispatching system which assigns the request to a taxi. The opportunistic requests correspond to the traditional taxi services picking up passengers at cab-ranks or from the side of the road. Of course, this kind of requests is not processed by the dispatching system. The constraints of the management, as expressed by the STEP, are • A taxi must never break down • An opportunistic demand inside Paris and its suburbs must always be satisfied (legal environment of Paris) • The number of booking demands accepted has to be maximized The charging problem of the taxis must therefore be carefully addressed. At a tactical level, a good assignment of the trips to the taxis is crucial. We propose an efficient way
References: [AAR09] A. Alshamsi, S. Abdallah, and I. Rahwan, Multiagent self-organization for a taxi dispatch system, 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2009. [CR74] R. L. Church and C. ReVelle, The maximal covering location problem, Papers of the Regional Science Association 32 (1974), 101–118. [DS81] M. S. Daskin and E. H. Stern, A hierarchical objective set covering model for emergency medical service vehicle deployment, Transportation Science 15 (1981), no. 2, 137–152. [GLS97] M. Gendreau, G. Laporte, and F. Semet, Solving an ambulance location model by tabu search, Location Science 5 (1997), no. 2, 75–88. [Hak64] S. L. Hakimi, Optimum locations of switching centers and the absolute centers and medians of a graph, Operations Research 12 (1964), no. 3, 450–459. [Hor02] M. E. T. Horn, Fleet scheduling and dispatching for demand-responsive passenger services, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies 10 (2002), no. 1, 35–63. 14 [HR86] K. Hogan and C. S. ReVelle, Concept and applications of backup coverage, Management Science 32 (1986), no. 11, 1434–1444. [Jia08] Y. Jia, Improvement program of urban taxi stops based on simulated annealing algorithm in the context of china, Proceedings of the 2008 Second International Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computing (Washington, DC, USA), IEEE Computer Society, 2008, pp. 356–359. [LE96] P. Lopez and P. Esquirol, Consistency enforcing in scheduling: A general formulation based on energetic reasoning, 5th International Workshop on Projet Management and Scheduling (PMS’96) (Poznan (Poland)), 1996, pp. 155–158. [LSP08] J. H. Lee, I. H. Shin, and G. L. Park, Pick-up pattern for taxi location recommendation, 4th International Conference on Networked Computing and Advanced Information Management, 2008. [LWCT04] D.-H. Lee, H. Wang, R. L. Cheu, and S. H. Teo, Taxi dispatch system based on current demands and real-time traffic conditions, Transportation Research Record (2004), no. 1882, 193–200. [MMYH10] Q. Meng, S. Mabu, L. Yu, and K. Hirasawa, A novel taxi dispatch system integrating a multicustomer strategy and genetic network programming, Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics 14 (2010), no. 5. [NSZ02] K. Neumann, C. Schwindt, and J. Zimmermann, Project Scheduling with Time Windows and Scarce Resources, Springer, 2002. [OD98] S. H. Owen and M. S. Daskin, Strategic facility location: A review, European Journal of Operational Research 111 (1998), no. 3, 423–447. [Sav92] M. W. P. Savelsbergh, The vehicle routing problem with time windows: Minimizing route duration, INFORMS Journal on Computing 4 (1992), no. 2, 146–154. [SCMK97] M. Shrivastava, P. K. Chande, A. S. Monga, and H. Kashiwagi, Taxi dispatch: A fuzzy approach, IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation System, 1997. [SDL10] K. T. Seow, N. H. Dang, and D.-H. Lee, A collaborative multiagent taxi-dispatch system, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering 7 (2010), no. 3, 607–616. [SVB93] D. A. Schilling, J. Vaidyanathan, and R. Barkhi, A review of covering problems in facility location, Location Science 1 (1993), no. 1, 25–55. [VP10] C. N. Vijeyamurthy and R. Panneerselvam, Literature review of covering problem in operations management, International Journal of Services, Economics and Management 2 (2010), no. 3-4, 267–285. [WC74] J. A. White and K. E. Case, On covering problems and the central facilities location problems, Geographical Analysis 6 (1974), no. 3, 281–294. [Web29] A. Webber, Uber den Standort der Industrien (Alfred Weber’s Theory of the Location of Industries), 1929. [WLC09] H. Wang, D.-H. Lee, and R. Cheu, PDPTW based taxi dispatch modeling for booking service, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Natural computation (Piscataway, NJ, USA), ICNC’09, IEEE Press, 2009, pp. 242–247. ´ ´ ´ Universite Paris Est, CERMICS, 6-8 avenue Blaise Pascal, Cite Descartes, 77455 Marne-la-Vallee, Cedex 2, France E-mail address: bernat.gacias@gmail.com ´ ´ ´ Universite Paris Est, CERMICS, 6-8 avenue Blaise Pascal, Cite Descartes, 77455 Marne-la-Vallee, Cedex 2, France E-mail address: frederic.meunier@cermics.enpc.fr hal-00721875, version 2 - 31 Jul 2012 15