A multi-criteria large neighbourhood search for the transportation of disabled people

This paper addresses the problem of optimizing the transportation of disabled persons from home to specialized centres or schools. It is modelled as a Dial‐a‐ride problem (DARP), where several people share the same destination. Particular emphasis is placed on the objective function in order to consider several potentially conflicting interests. We propose a multi‐criteria model from Multi‐attribute Utility Theory based on the Choquet integral. The resulting multi‐criteria DARP is then solved with a large neighbourhood search algorithm. This method includes classical destroy and repair heuristics as well as new operators exploiting the shared destination feature and criterion‐specific operators. The algorithm is evaluated on a set of 14 real‐world instances in the field of health care logistics, with up to 200 requests and 51 destination points.