A stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem is an undiscounted Markov decision process with an absorbing and zero-cost target state, where the objective is to reach the target state with minimum expected cost. This problem provides a foundation for algorithms for decision-theoretic planning and probabilistic model checking, among other applications. This thesis describes an implementation and evaluation of recently developed error bounds for SSP problems. The bounds can be used in a test for convergence of iterative dynamic programming algorithms for solving SSP problems, as well as in action elimination procedures that can accelerate convergence by excluding provably suboptimal actions that do not need to be re-evaluated each iteration. The techniques are shown to be effective for both decision-theoretic planning and probabilistic model checking.

This thesis deals with shortest paths problem in graphs. Shortest paths problem is the basic issue of graph theory with many pracitcal applications. We can divide this problem into two following generalizations: single-source shortest path problem and all-pairs shortest paths problem. This text introduces principles and algorithms for generalizations. We describe both classical and new more efficient methods. It contains information about how some of these algorithms were implemented and offers an experimental comparison of these algorithms.

Le besoin de se déplacer est un besoin fondamental dans la vie de tous les jours. Avec l’extension continue des zones urbaines, l’augmentation de la population et l’amélioration du niveau de vie des citoyens, le nombre de voitures ne cesse d’augmenter. Ceci étant, la plupart des transports publics proposés aujourd’hui obéissent à des règles qui manquent de souplesse et qui incluent rarement le caractère dynamique, en temps et en espace, de la demande. Cela réduit ainsi l’attractivité de ces services et les rendant même parfois difficilement supportables. De ce fait, la majorité des usagers utilisent encore leur propre véhicule. Ce grand nombre de véhicules, qui est en augmentation continue sur les réseaux routiers, provoque de nombreux phénomènes de congestion induisant une surconsommation de carburant, des émissions inutiles de gaz à effet de serre et une perte de temps importante. Pour y remédier, nous proposons dans cette thèse de nouveaux systèmes de déplacement des usagers avec différents modèles d’optimisation pour la mobilité partagée (covoiturage et taxis-partagés) ainsi que la combinaison de la mobilité partagée avec les transports publics. Les expérimentations sont réalisées sur de vrais réseaux routiers ainsi que sur des données réelles. Ces nouveaux systèmes améliorent considérablement la qualité de service des systèmes classiques existants en termes de coût et de flexibilité tout en ayant un temps de calcul raisonnable. / The travelling is a fundamental part of everyday life. The continuous expansion of urban areas combined with the population increasing and the improvement of life standards increases the need of mobility and the use of private cars. Furthermore, the majority of public transportations are subject to rules lacking of flexibility and rarely taking into account the dynamic context. The attractiveness of public transportation is therefore reduced and, as a consequence, its financial support, resulting in a further deterioration of the public services quality and flexibility. Therefore, the majority of users still use their own vehicles. The number of vehicles is continuously increasing on road networks causing important phenomena of congestion, high fuel consumption and emissions of greenhouse gases, time loss. This unpleasant situation forces communities to consider alternative solutions for the mobility such as ride-sharing, an interesting alternative to solo car use. The overall objective of this thesis is to propose new travel systems for users through the introduction of optimization models for shared mobility (ride-sharing and taxi-sharing) and the combination of shared mobility and public transportation. The computational experiments are carried out on real road networks and real data. Our numerical results show the effectiveness of our approach, which improves the quality of service compared to the traditional systems in terms of cost and flexibility. The running time remains reasonable to allow using our framework in real-time transportation applications.

In this dissertation, the problem of planning the motion of m Unmanned Vehicles (UVs) (or simply vehicles) through n points in a plane is considered. A motion plan for a vehicle is given by the sequence of points and the corresponding angles at which each point must be visited by the vehicle. We require that each vehicle return to the same initial location(depot) at the same heading after visiting the points. The objective of the motion planning problem is to choose at most q(≤ m) UVs and find their motion plans so that all the points are visited and the total cost of the tours of the chosen vehicles is a minimum amongst all the possible choices of vehicles and their tours. This problem is a generalization of the wellknown Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) in many ways: (1) each UV takes the role of salesman (2) motion constraints of the UVs play an important role in determining the cost of travel between any two locations; in fact, the cost of the travel between any two locations depends on direction of travel along with the heading at the origin and destination, and (3) there is an additional combinatorial complexity stemming from the need to partition the points to be visited by each UV and the set of UVs that must be employed by the mission. In this dissertation, a sub-optimal, two-step approach to motion planning is presented to solve this problem:(1) the combinatorial problem of choosing the vehicles and their associated tours is based on Euclidean distances between points and (2) once the sequence of points to be visited is specified, the heading at each point is determined based on a Dynamic Programming scheme. The solution to the first step is based on a generalization of Held-Karp’s method. We modify the Lagrangian heuristics for finding a close sub-optimal solution. In the later chapters of the dissertation, we relax the assumption that all vehicles are homogenous. The motivation of heterogenous variant of Multi-depot, Multiple Traveling Salesmen Problem (MDMTSP) derives form applications involving Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or ground robots requiring multiple vehicles with different capabilities to visit a set of locations.

Adoption of electric vehicles has been restrained by the availability of charging stations and consumer fear of being stranded with a depleted battery, far from the nearest charger. In many areas of the world, charging stations are now widely available and the transition from vehicles with internal combustion engines is accelerating, though still in a fairly early stage. For electric vehicle drivers in those areas, anxiety that they will not be able to find a charger (“range anxiety”) is subsiding. However, differences in charging speed and pricing between stations and different outlets at the same station can be large. Total trip duration can vary significantly based on the charging outlet selected. Prior research has developed methods for helping all drivers find the fastest route and for electric vehicle drivers to ensure that they are able to complete their trip. Additional research has explored other complexities of route selection for electric vehicles such as how to select optimal stations for charging based on the total trip duration, including driving and charging time. Pricing for recharging electric vehicles at public chargers is more complex and diverse than for gas filling stations due to the differences in charging rates and the relatively low competition. This research investigates those differences. Using design science research methodology, a method is presented for determining which charging stops result in the lowest possible charging cost for a given route. The method is demonstrated through experiment with random routes within Sweden. The experimental results show that the average cost savings as compared to the duration-optimal route is 15% and 139 SEK per additional hour of trip time. One possible direction for future work is to improve the performance of the algorithm for use in real-time consumer route planning applications.

As the interest in electric heavy-duty vehicles has grown, so has the need for route planning tools to coordinate fleets of electric vehicles. This problem is called the Electric Vehicle Routing Problem (EVRP) and it can be solved using a Branch-Price-and-Cut method, where routes for individual vehicles are iteratively generated using information from the coordinated problem. These routes are computed in a pricing problem, which is a Resource Constrained Elementary Shortest Path Problem (RCESPP). Because of its iterative nature, the Branch-Price-and-Cut method is dependent on a fast solver for this RCSPP to get a good computational performance. In this thesis, we have implemented a labeling algorithm for the RCESSP for electric vehicles with state-of-the-art acceleration strategies. We further suggest a new bounding method that exploits the electric aspects of the problem. The algorithm's performance and the effect of the different acceleration strategies are evaluated on benchmark instances for the EVRP, and we report significantly improved computational times when using our bounding method for all types of instances. We find that route relaxation methods (ng-routes) were particularly advantageous in test instances with a combination of clustered and randomly distributed customers. Interestingly, for test instances with only randomly distributed customers, ng-relaxation required longer processing time to achieve elementary optimal routes and for these instances, the bounding methods gave better computational performance.

Avec les problèmes présents dans le secteur de transport, qu'ils soient financiers ou environnementaux, la mobilité avancée peut y remédier avec la mise à profit de la complémentarité entre les différents modes de transport. Dans ce contexte, nous nous focalisons dans cette thèse à la mise en œuvre d'un système d’information de transport avec la recherche et la composition des itinéraires comodaux pour les clients. L'enjeu est d'être capable de répondre aux attentes des usagers avec des solutions satisfaisantes permettant de proposer des itinéraires optimaux pour gérer efficacement l’intermodalité. Dans un souci pratique, nous fournirons des itinéraires attractifs respectant les contraintes imposées même pour les requêtes simultanées. Nous utilisons des techniques d'accélération permettant de réduire l'espace de recherche pour la planification d’itinéraire. Les itinéraires attractifs sont décomposés en sections de route sur lesquelles les différentes demandes et les offres disponibles sont mises en relation. Les combinaisons des sections de route permettent d'aboutir à un ensemble de solutions intéressantes. L’aspect distribué et dynamique du problème nous a permis d'employer une modélisation basée sur le paradigme agent. Ainsi, l’alliance entre les systèmes multi-agents et les algorithmes génétiques que nous avons mis en place s'avère très utile pour gérer l’articulation de l’intermodalité entre ces différents modes de transport. Les résultats de simulation présentés montrent l’efficacité des méthodes proposées. / Nowadays, the environment impact of transport is significant. In an attempt to address these problems, in this work, we are interested in the implementation of a transport information system, which integrates the existing means of transport to respond users' requests, including public transport and the shared transport like carpooling and car-sharing. In this context of application, we elaborate algorithms to provide attractive paths with respect to the imposed constraints, even for simultaneous requests. Different acceleration techniques for path planning are used to reduce the search space for a better performance. The attractive paths are divided into route sections on which the available offers are allocated to different requests, which is treated as one resource allocation problem using metaheuristics algorithms. With consideration of the distributed and dynamic aspects of the problem, the solving strategy makes use of several concepts like multi-agents system and different optimization methods. The proposed methods are tested with realistic scenarios with instances extracted from real world transport networks. The obtained results indicate that our proposed approaches can efficiently solve the itinerary planning problems by providing good and complete solutions.

<p>Traffic planning in a modern congested society is an important and time consuming procedure. Finding fast algorithms for solving traffic problems is therefore of great interest for traffic planners allover the world. </p><p>This thesis concerns solving the fixed demand traffic assignment problem (TAP) on a number of different transportation test networks. TAP is solved using the Frank-Wolfe algorithm and the shortest path problems that arise as subproblems to the Frank-Wolfe algorithm are solved using the network simplex algorithm. We evaluate how a number of existing pricing strategies to the network simplex algorithm performs with TAP. We also construct a new efficient pricing strategy, the Bucket Pricing Strategy, inspired by the heap implementation of Dijkstra's method for shortest path problems. This pricing strategy is, together with the actual use of the network simplex algorithm, the main result of the thesis and the pricing strategy is designed to take advantage of the special structure of TAP. In addition to performing tests on the conventional Frank-Wolfe algorithm, we also test how the different pricing strategies perform on Frank-Wolfe algorithms using conjugate and bi-conjugate search directions. </p><p>These test results show that the updating shortest path calculations obtained by using the network simplex outperforms the non-updating Frank-Wolfe algorithms. Comparisons with Bar-Gera's OBA show that our implementation, especially together with the bucket pricing strategy, also outperforms this algorithm for relative gaps down to 10E-6.</p>

Empirical studies show that similar patterns emerge from a large number of different biological systems. For example, the group size distributions of several fish species and house sparrows all follow power law distributions with an exponential truncation. Networks built by ant colonies, slime mold and those are designed by engineers resemble each other in terms of structure and transportation efficiency. Based on the investigation of experimental data, we propose a variety of simple stochastic models to unravel the underlying mechanisms which lead to the collective phenomena in different systems. All the mechanisms employed in these models are rooted in the concept of selective reinforcement. In some systems the reinforcement can build optimal solutions for biological problem solving. This thesis consists of five papers. In the first three papers, I collaborate with biologists to look into group formation in house sparrows  and the movement decisions of damsel fish.  In the last two articles, I look at how shortest paths and networks are  constructed by slime molds and pheromone laying ants, as well as studying  speed-accuracy tradeoffs in slime molds' decision making. The general goal of the study is to better understand how macro level patterns and behaviors emerges from micro level interactions in both spatial and non-spatial biological systems. With the combination of mathematical modeling and experimentation, we are able to reproduce the macro level patterns in the studied biological systems and predict behaviors of the systems using minimum number of parameters.

Traffic planning in a modern congested society is an important and time consuming procedure. Finding fast algorithms for solving traffic problems is therefore of great interest for traffic planners allover the world. This thesis concerns solving the fixed demand traffic assignment problem (TAP) on a number of different transportation test networks. TAP is solved using the Frank-Wolfe algorithm and the shortest path problems that arise as subproblems to the Frank-Wolfe algorithm are solved using the network simplex algorithm. We evaluate how a number of existing pricing strategies to the network simplex algorithm performs with TAP. We also construct a new efficient pricing strategy, the Bucket Pricing Strategy, inspired by the heap implementation of Dijkstra's method for shortest path problems. This pricing strategy is, together with the actual use of the network simplex algorithm, the main result of the thesis and the pricing strategy is designed to take advantage of the special structure of TAP. In addition to performing tests on the conventional Frank-Wolfe algorithm, we also test how the different pricing strategies perform on Frank-Wolfe algorithms using conjugate and bi-conjugate search directions. These test results show that the updating shortest path calculations obtained by using the network simplex outperforms the non-updating Frank-Wolfe algorithms. Comparisons with Bar-Gera's OBA show that our implementation, especially together with the bucket pricing strategy, also outperforms this algorithm for relative gaps down to 10E-6.