Patent attributes
A system and method for assigning trip requests to schedules for a fleet of one or more available vehicles in a manner that allows for the comparison of the various possible schedules against a number of global factors. Trip requests are combined into packets and one or more packets that can serve as a root packet or a first packet to be serviced by a partial shift are determined. Schedules are determined for each of the one or more possible root packets. The schedules are ranked according to one or more global factors to select a schedule for the partial shift. By generating combinations of packets that can be assigned to partial shifts, the problem of combinatorial explosion is reduced such that alternative schedules can be compared against one or more quality metrics for the schedule.