scholarly journals Scheduling of a Parcel Delivery System Consisting of an Aerial Drone Interacting with Public Transportation Vehicles

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (7) ◽  
pp. 2045
Author(s):  
Hailong Huang ◽  
Andrey V. Savkin ◽  
Chao Huang

This paper proposes a novel parcel delivery system which consists of a drone and public transportation vehicles such as trains, trams, etc. This system involves two delivery schemes: drone-direct scheme referring to delivering to a customer by a drone directly and drone–vehicle collaborating scheme referring to delivering a customer based on the collaboration of a drone and public transportation vehicles. The fundamental characteristics including the delivery time, energy consumption and battery recharging are modelled, based on which a time-dependent scheduling problem for a single drone is formulated. It is shown to be NP-complete and a dynamic programming-based exact algorithm is presented. Since its computational complexity is exponential with respect to the number of customers, a sub-optimal algorithm is further developed. This algorithm accounts the time for delivery and recharging, and it first schedules the customer which leads to the earliest return. Its computational complexity is also discussed. Moreover, extensive computer simulations are conducted to demonstrate the scheduling performance of the proposed algorithms and the impacts of several key system parameters are investigated.

Author(s):  
Yi Ding ◽  
Baoshen Guo ◽  
Lin Zheng ◽  
Mingming Lu ◽  
Desheng Zhang ◽  
...  

The revolution of online shopping in recent years demands corresponding evolution in delivery services in urban areas. To cater to this trend, delivery by the crowd has become an alternative to the traditional delivery services thanks to the advances in ubiquitous computing. Notably, some studies use public transportation for crowdsourcing delivery, given its low-cost delivery network with millions of passengers as potential couriers. However, multiple practical impact factors are not considered in existing public-transport-based crowdsourcing delivery studies due to a lack of data and limited ubiquitous computing infrastructures in the past. In this work, we design a crowdsourcing delivery system based on public transport, considering the practical factors of time constraints, multi-hop delivery, and profits. To incorporate the impact factors, we build a reinforcement learning model to learn the optimal order dispatching strategies from massive passenger data and package data. The order dispatching problem is formulated as a sequential decision making problem for the packages routing, i.e., select the next station for the package. A delivery time estimation module is designed to accelerate the training process and provide statistical delivery time guarantee. Three months of real-world public transportation data and one month of package delivery data from an on-demand delivery platform in Shenzhen are used in the evaluation. Compared with existing crowdsourcing delivery algorithms and widely used baselines, we achieve a 40% increase in profit rates and a 29% increase in delivery rates. Comparison with other reinforcement learning algorithms shows that we can improve the profit rate and the delivery rate by 9% and 8% by using time estimation in action filtering. We share the data used in the project to the community for other researchers to validate our results and conduct further research.1 [1].


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Sushmita Gupta ◽  
Pranabendu Misra ◽  
Saket Saurabh ◽  
Meirav Zehavi

An input to the P OPULAR M ATCHING problem, in the roommates setting (as opposed to the marriage setting), consists of a graph G (not necessarily bipartite) where each vertex ranks its neighbors in strict order, known as its preference. In the P OPULAR M ATCHING problem the objective is to test whether there exists a matching M * such that there is no matching M where more vertices prefer their matched status in M (in terms of their preferences) over their matched status in M *. In this article, we settle the computational complexity of the P OPULAR M ATCHING problem in the roommates setting by showing that the problem is NP-complete. Thus, we resolve an open question that has been repeatedly and explicitly asked over the last decade.


2008 ◽  
Vol Vol. 10 no. 3 (Graph and Algorithms) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dariusz Dereniowski ◽  
Adam Nadolski

Graphs and Algorithms International audience We study two variants of edge-coloring of edge-weighted graphs, namely compact edge-coloring and circular compact edge-coloring. First, we discuss relations between these two coloring models. We prove that every outerplanar bipartite graph admits a compact edge-coloring and that the decision problem of the existence of compact circular edge-coloring is NP-complete in general. Then we provide a polynomial time 1:5-approximation algorithm and pseudo-polynomial exact algorithm for compact circular coloring of odd cycles and prove that it is NP-hard to optimally color these graphs. Finally, we prove that if a path P2 is joined by an edge to an odd cycle then the problem of the existence of a compact circular coloring becomes NP-complete.


2022 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Franco Maria Nardini ◽  
Roberto Trani ◽  
Rossano Venturini

Modern search services often provide multiple options to rank the search results, e.g., sort “by relevance”, “by price” or “by discount” in e-commerce. While the traditional rank by relevance effectively places the relevant results in the top positions of the results list, the rank by attribute could place many marginally relevant results in the head of the results list leading to poor user experience. In the past, this issue has been addressed by investigating the relevance-aware filtering problem, which asks to select the subset of results maximizing the relevance of the attribute-sorted list. Recently, an exact algorithm has been proposed to solve this problem optimally. However, the high computational cost of the algorithm makes it impractical for the Web search scenario, which is characterized by huge lists of results and strict time constraints. For this reason, the problem is often solved using efficient yet inaccurate heuristic algorithms. In this article, we first prove the performance bounds of the existing heuristics. We then propose two efficient and effective algorithms to solve the relevance-aware filtering problem. First, we propose OPT-Filtering, a novel exact algorithm that is faster than the existing state-of-the-art optimal algorithm. Second, we propose an approximate and even more efficient algorithm, ϵ-Filtering, which, given an allowed approximation error ϵ, finds a (1-ϵ)–optimal filtering, i.e., the relevance of its solution is at least (1-ϵ) times the optimum. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the two proposed algorithms against state-of-the-art competitors on two real-world public datasets. Experimental results show that OPT-Filtering achieves a significant speedup of up to two orders of magnitude with respect to the existing optimal solution, while ϵ-Filtering further improves this result by trading effectiveness for efficiency. In particular, experiments show that ϵ-Filtering can achieve quasi-optimal solutions while being faster than all state-of-the-art competitors in most of the tested configurations.


Fractals ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (08) ◽  
pp. 1950135 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIA-BAO LIU ◽  
JING ZHAO ◽  
JIE MIN ◽  
JINDE CAO

The computational complexity of the Hosoya index of a given graph is NP-Complete. Let [Formula: see text] be the graph constructed from [Formula: see text] by a triangle instead of all vertices of the initial graph [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we characterize the Hosoya index of the graph [Formula: see text]. To our surprise, it shows that the Hosoya index of [Formula: see text] is thoroughly given by the order and degrees of all the vertices of the initial graph [Formula: see text].


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bredereck ◽  
Jiehua Chen ◽  
Ugo Paavo Finnendahl ◽  
Rolf Niedermeier

Abstract The classical Stable Roommates problem is to decide whether there exists a matching of an even number of agents such that no two agents which are not matched to each other would prefer to be with each other rather than with their respectively assigned partners. We investigate Stable Roommates with complete (i.e., every agent can be matched with any other agent) or incomplete preferences, with ties (i.e., two agents are considered of equal value to some agent) or without ties. It is known that in general allowing ties makes the problem NP-complete. We provide algorithms for Stable Roommates that are, compared to those in the literature, more efficient when the input preferences are complete and have some structural property, such as being narcissistic, single-peaked, and single-crossing. However, when the preferences are incomplete and have ties, we show that being single-peaked and single-crossing does not reduce the computational complexity—Stable Roommates remains NP-complete.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 70
Author(s):  
Ha Yoon Song ◽  
Hyochang Han

Recently, IoT technology, low power networking technology for IoT, and geopositioning systems are very useful tools for future applications. One of the applications is the logistics system, especially for the point to point delivery. The current parcel delivery system is delivered through the logistics hub despite latent economic disadvantages in terms of delivery time and delivery distance. The major disadvantage of current hub and spoke delivery system is that individual parcels must go to the logistics hub first even if the origin and destination are nearby or within a distance that can be delivered through the hub. These sorts of delivery are inefficient and increase total expense of delivery in terms of delivery time and delivery costs. We designed a new delivery system of point to point delivery using IoT technology and end-to-end IoT platform based on ThingPlug and LoRa technology for fast delivery and less cost of delivery. We designed an IoT device that can be part of parcels or attached to parcels, which have various functionalities including the capability to understand current delivery routes with the use of geopositioning systems. In addition, we addressed the difficulties with issues such as linking IoT device into IoT platforms and designing IoT device functionalities. We also showed methods to improve the efficiency of IoT based parcel delivery systems. The proposed system may improve economics of parcel delivery system by reducing travel distance for delivery and dissipation of delivery time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (5) ◽  
pp. 1237-1271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Håvard Bakke Bjerkevik ◽  
Magnus Bakke Botnan ◽  
Michael Kerber

Abstract We show that computing the interleaving distance between two multi-graded persistence modules is NP-hard. More precisely, we show that deciding whether two modules are 1-interleaved is NP-complete, already for bigraded, interval decomposable modules. Our proof is based on previous work showing that a constrained matrix invertibility problem can be reduced to the interleaving distance computation of a special type of persistence modules. We show that this matrix invertibility problem is NP-complete. We also give a slight improvement in the above reduction, showing that also the approximation of the interleaving distance is NP-hard for any approximation factor smaller than 3. Additionally, we obtain corresponding hardness results for the case that the modules are indecomposable, and in the setting of one-sided stability. Furthermore, we show that checking for injections (resp. surjections) between persistence modules is NP-hard. In conjunction with earlier results from computational algebra this gives a complete characterization of the computational complexity of one-sided stability. Lastly, we show that it is in general NP-hard to approximate distances induced by noise systems within a factor of 2.


2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
LOES OLDE LOOHUIS ◽  
YDE VENEMA

We study a generalization of the standard syntax and game-theoretic semantics of logic, which is based on a duality between two players, to a multiplayer setting. We define propositional and modal languages of multiplayer formulas, and provide them with a semantics involving a multiplayer game. Our focus is on the notion of equivalence between two formulas, which is defined by saying that two formulas are equivalent if under each valuation, the set of players with a winning strategy is the same in the two respective associated games. We provide a derivation system which enumerates the pairs of equivalent formulas, both in the propositional case and in the modal case. Our approach is algebraic: We introduce multiplayer algebras as the analogue of Boolean algebras, and show, as the corresponding analog to Stone’s theorem, that these abstract multiplayer algebras can be represented as concrete ones which capture the game-theoretic semantics. For the modal case we prove a similar result. We also address the computational complexity of the problem whether two given multiplayer formulas are equivalent. In the propositional case, we show that this problem is co-NP-complete, whereas in the modal case, it is PSPACE-hard.


2008 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Pratt-Hartmann

AbstractThe numerically definite syllogistic is the fragment of English obtained by extending the language of the classical syllogism with numerical quantifiers. The numerically definite relational syllogistic is the fragment of English obtained by extending the numerically definite syllogistic with predicates involving transitive verbs. This paper investigates the computational complexity of the satisfiability problem for these fragments. We show that the satisfiability problem (= finite satisfiability problem) for the numerically definite syllogistic is strongly NP-complete, and that the satisfiability problem (= finite satisfiability problem) for the numerically definite relational syllogistic is NEXPTIME-complete, but perhaps not strongly so. We discuss the related problem of probabilistic (propositional) satisfiability, and thereby demonstrate the incompleteness of some proof-systems that have been proposed for the numerically definite syllogistic.


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