The next generation of public transport: the pickup and delivery problem with online transfers

Gizem Özbaygın

Dept of Industrial Engineering, Bilkent University

We introduce and study a variant of the vehicle routing problem, which we call the pickup and delivery problem with online transfers (PDPOT), motivated by an innovative passenger transportation concept involving autonomous modular vehicles.These vehicles are designed in a way that they can couple/decouple while en-route and transfer passengers seamlessly towards more efficient capacity utilization and traffic management. Due to the potential reduction in fuel/energy consumption and travel costs, there are studies in the vehicle routing literature taking transfer opportunities into account within their framework. However, the main difference and perhaps the most challenging aspect of the PDPOT is that when two or more vehicles couple, the passengers may transfer from one vehicle to another during the time the vehicles are traveling together as a single vehicle. We propose mixed integer programming formulations and develop column generation based heuristics to solve the problem and analyze the potential benefits of online transfer opportunities.

short bio

Gizem Özbaygın is a faculty member in the Industrial Engineering Department at Bilkent University. Prior to joining Bilkent, she worked as an assistant professor in the Industrial Engineering Program at Sabancı University between 2017 and 2024. She received her B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Bilkent University Industrial Engineering Department in 2011 and 2017, respectively. Her dissertation was focused on the design and development of efficient optimization algorithms for solving several variants of the vehicle routing problem. During her Ph.D. studies, she spent a year at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology as a visiting student. She has a strong background in modeling and solving large-scale optimization problems with a particular focus on vehicle routing and scheduling.
Dr. Özbaygın spent the 2022-2023 academic year in Canada working as a Senior Operations Research Scientist for 1QBit, a quantum computing software company based in Vancouver. She remains to be an advisor to the company and has ongoing collaborations with the research & development team at 1QBit. The use of quantum computing and more generally, physics-inspired alternatives to classical computing as a means to solve difficult optimization problems is among her recent research interests.