August 20, 2012

Real-Time Scheduling of ACCESS Paratransit Transportation

The goal of this project is to increase the effectiveness of paratransit service providers in managing daily operations through the development and deployment of dynamic, real-time scheduling technology. We focus specifically on the daily operations problem faced by the service providers of ACCESS Transportation Systems, the largest paratransit organization in the Southwestern Pennsylvania Region. The core dynamic paratransit scheduling capabilities provide for maintaining situational awareness of the states of current and future trips, for detecting when trips are in jeopardy, and for generating options for rerouting trips in order to improve service. This technology provides a basis for significantly improving customer quality of service, while simultaneously decreasing provider costs and providing the opportunity to offer expanded same-day request service.

Robotics Institute project page