Optimal On-the-Fly Route Planning With Rich Transportation Requests

This article considers the route planning problem for a vehicle with limited capacity operating in a road network. The vehicle is assigned a set of transportation requests that are more complex than traveling between two locations, may involve dependencies between their subtasks, and include deadlines and priorities. The requests arrive gradually over the deployment time-horizon, and thus replanning is needed for new requests. We address cases when not all requests can be serviced by their deadlines despite car sharing. We introduce multiple quality measures for plans that account for requests’ delays with respect to deadlines and priorities. We formalize the problem as planning in a weighted transition system under syntactically cosafe LTL formulas. We develop an online planning and replanning algorithm based on the automata-based approach to least-violating plan synthesis and on translation to a mixed integer linear program (MILP). Furthermore, we show that the MILP reduces to graph search for a subclass of quality measures that satisfy a monotonicity property. We show the approach in simulations, including a case study on the mid-Manhattan road network over the span of 24 h.