Programação e roteirização dinâmica de veículos aplicado ao serviço de transporte de cadeirantes

Abstract

This research aims at developing a decision support system for scheduling and routing vehicles dedicated to transporting handicapped people (Dial-a-Ride Problem), considering dynamic factors. For this, a review related to wheelchair transportation is presented, as well as the main laws and statistics of the area, the main methods and concepts of dynamic scheduling and routing of vehicles (Dynamic Routing Problem) and also the methods and concepts of information system development. Amongst the methods of dynamic scheduling and routing presented, the insertion heuristics method stands out, method which is used as a reference for this research and was applied in it. The system was developed in VBA language (Visual Basic for Applications), and was tested with real data of 20 days of operation of the wheelchair transportation system located in the Vitória metropolitan area, the Serviço Especial Mão na Roda, which contained a total of 3,525 users registered by July/2014. In order to accomplish the tests of the proposed system and analyze its outputs, the results of the 20 samples selected were analyzed based on the distance increase on the routes due to the attendance of the new solicitations, processing times, demand of new solicitations and capability of insertion within the routes, according to results presented by the program. Moreover, the data was compared with the scheduling results from empirical methods used by the scheduling center and the schedule proposed by de system. The results show that the proposed system is capable of inserting new solicitations dynamically onto existing routes, with an average computational processing time of five seconds/request. Finally, the research resulted in the development of a software which was registered at the Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial.