Complexity, algorithmic, and computational aspects of a dial-a-ride type problem

In dial-a-ride systems involving autonomous vehicles circulating along a circuit, a fleet of vehicles must serve clients who request rides between stations of the circuit such that the total number of pickup and drop-off operations is minimized. In this paper, we focus on a unitary variant where each client requests a single place in the vehicles and all the clients must be served within a single tour of the circuit. Such unitary variant induces a combinatorial optimization problem for which we introduce a nontrivial special case that is polynomially solvable when the capacity of each vehicle is at most 2 but it is NP-Hard otherwise. We also study the polytope associated with the solutions to this problem. We introduce new families of valid inequalities and give necessary and sufficient conditions under which they are facet-defining. Based on these inequalities, we devise an efficient branch-and-cut algorithm that outperforms the state-of-the-art commercial solvers.