Opportunistic planning for a fleet of transportation robots

Presents a heuristic solution to the dynamic transportation planning problem using a blackboard-based architectural approach. The proposed Intelligent Transportation Planning System is based on the Generic Blackboard Shell (GBS) and comprises traffic simulation and vehicle locomotion models as well as various problem-solving strategies. The realised dynamic vehicle assignment and routing strategies modify deployment plans in response to changes in traffic conditions and to new passenger requests. The effectiveness of the system has been demonstrated in a simulation using a fleet of taxi robots with randomly generated road networks, background traffic load and passenger requests, and compared with commonly-used approaches.