| Summary |
Aging society and disability welfare are both crucial issues for developed and developing countries in recent years. According to the National Development Council and Ministry of Health and Welfare, the population of the disability is more than 1.18 million in 2018, while Tainan has the highest
disability rate among all municipalities. The ageing population is expected to be more than 20% in 2025, which means that Taiwan will become a super-aged society within 4 years. Currently, the government provides Rehabus, long-term care bus, and universal taxi service to guarantee daily mobility for the disabilities. However, due to manual handling on fleet management, each
scheduling task takes about 1 to 3 days. This research mainly focuses on the operation of Rehabuses. Analyses and comparisons are conducted for four kinds of operation ways in terms of operator numbers and partitioning methods on scheduling. An automatic scheduling method based on mathematic model with ALNS algorithm is developed and applied for optimizing the operation. Two
cases with a small scale have been used to prove the accuracy of solutions obtained by ALNS algorithm and exact method. It is shown that the difference between solution solved by ALNS algorithm and the exact solution is lower than 5%. An empirical case of the Tainan Rehabus has been conducted with its operational pattern of high repeatability. The average compile time of ALNS
algorithm is less than 10 minutes, and the solution can improve up to 12.8% of total cost compared with the solution of manual scheduling. In addition, total amount of 16.93% cost can be improved if all the companies are integrated with automatic scheduling and operation. It is also shown that about 70% of the benefits come from releasing the top 20% demands. The results of this study show that automatic scheduling methods can effectively improve the current manual operation situation. The optimization model developed can also be applied to other similar systems for improving accessible mobility |
