One-Shot Coordination of Feeder Vehicles for Multi-Modal Transportation

In this paper, we consider coordinated control of feeder vehicles in the first leg of a multi-modal transport system. In particular, we consider a one-shot problem wherein the passengers must be transported to a common destination before a fixed deadline. We pose the problem as the maximization of the service provider's profits through optimal pricing and feeder allocations given the knowledge of demand and supply distributions. Though the original problem is non-linear, with optimal pricing scheme we reduce it to a linear program. We then move on to developing an off-line route elimination algorithm that reduces the problem size in terms of computation memory and time. Further, we provide a simplified way to compute the maximum possible profits as a function of total supply for a given demand distribution. We test the framework with simulations on a 20 node graph under a fixed-demand profile.