Energy-efficient Cyber Physical Social System for Transportation with Appointments

Time windows have great importance in the design of cyber physical systems (CPS) for transportation. In contrast to most transportation systems, where the time flexibility of customers is inadequately represented by fixed pick-up or delivery time windows, this paper assigns optimized pick-up or delivery time windows (appointments) with certain length inside exogenous flexibility time windows. The concept of appointments in flexibility time windows enables customers to report their true time flexibility, while keeping the pick-up or delivery time window short. By integrating the customers time flexibility substantially in the optimization of the transportation system, it well-deserved the description of cyber physical social system (CPSS). Simulations on the cordeau dataset confirm, that the new time window concept is very promising, since an user-accepted exploitment of time flexibility yields to less transportation costs. Further, our mixed integer program (MIP) determining appointment time windows, can also be used as a very fast preprocessing technique to shrink time windows in transportation problems, which yields to energy-efficient computation.