Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem with Ridesharing

The Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman Problem with Ridesharing is a model that joins elements from the Prize Collecting Traveling Salesman and the collaborative transport. The salesman is the driver of a capacitated vehicle and uses a ridesharing system to minimize travel costs. There are a penalty and a bonus associated with each vertex of a graph, G, that represents the problem. There is also a cost associated with each edge of G. The salesman must choose a subset of vertices to be visited so that the total bonus collection is at least a given a parameter. The length of the tour plus the sum of penalties of all vertices not visited is as small as possible. There is a set of persons demanding rides. The ride request consists of a pickup and a drop off location, a maximum travel duration, and the maximum amount the person agrees to pay. The driver shares the cost associated with each arc in the tour with the passengers in the vehicle. Constraints from ride requests, as well as the capacity of the car, must be satisfied. We present a mathematical formulation for the problem investigated in this study and solve it in an optimization tool. We also present three heuristics that hybridize exact and heuristic methods. These algorithms use a decomposition strategy that other enriched vehicle routing problems can utilize.