Heuristic approach for solving demand responsive transport scheduling problems

This study develops a fully flexible demand responsive transport (DRT) system that processes incoming requests immediately without advance reservations, fixed routes or stops, or prior demand aggregation. An insertion heuristic evaluates feasible vehicle assignments and pick-up and drop-off insertion positions subject to capacity and time-window constraints and pick-up-before-drop-off precedence, selecting the alternative with the smallest increase in vehicle travel time. The system was evaluated across 100 simulation runs on the Sioux Falls network with 80 requests per hour and four vehicles. Mean computation time per run was 2.14 s, and the mean request acceptance rate was 58.46%. Accepted passengers experienced mean waiting and detour times of 6.17 and 4.20 min, respectively. Increasing the fleet to eight vehicles raised the acceptance rate to 93.64% under the same demand. These findings demonstrate the computational feasibility of the proposed framework for real-time, fully flexible DRT operations.