Scheduling Vehicles for On-Time Arrival using Route-Reservations

In this work, we address the problem of scheduling vehicle departures from their origin such that they will arrive at their destination on-time. For this problem, vehicles transmit to a central scheduler their origin and destination pair and the time that they require to arrive at their destination. The scheduler determines each vehicle's departure time as well as the path to be followed while making the appropriate route reservations on the selected path such that all scheduled vehicles avoid congested road segments. Due to the reservations, the scheduler can guarantee on-time arrival at the destination for each vehicle request. In this paper, the mathematical formulation of the proposed problem is presented, and an efficient algorithmic solution is derived. Microscopic simulation results demonstrate the substantial improvements obtained by applying the proposed algorithm in realistic scenarios.