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Automated self-organising vehicles for Barclays Cycle Hire

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Abstract

Self-organisation is a distributed and asynchronous process in which global pattern or behaviour emerge from local components of the system. Neither central control nor external intervention is necessary during this process. Self-organising systems are adaptive and robust, which are appealing properties from a design and engineering point of view. In this paper, we present an innovative self-organisation approach for a dynamic vehicle routing problem, the Barclay Cycle Hire truck dispatch. In addition, we introduce an evolutionary algorithm capable of automatically configuring the “self-organising trucks”. Experimental results show the evolutionary algorithm improves the overall fitness of the self-organising trucks; and we observe global emergent behaviour in the way trucks self-organise.

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Notes

  1. The system captures docking points information from a live TfL data feed and stored it in our local database. The data is then fed into the self-organising system for signal calculation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stage Intelligence Ltd, London, UK

    Lin Li & Francois McDonald

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  1. Lin Li
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  2. Francois McDonald
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Correspondence to Lin Li.

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Li, L., McDonald, F. Automated self-organising vehicles for Barclays Cycle Hire. Memetic Comp. 5, 35–48 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12293-012-0101-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12293-012-0101-3

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