On-demand transportation system for cross-state abortion travel: A dual dial-a-ride problem

After the Supreme Court of the United States officially overturned Roe v. Wade, there is no longer a guarantee of a constitutional right to abortion in the United States. Academic communities show great concern for this situation; specifically, Nature, Science and leading medical journals expressed deep concern over this verdict. Revoking this verdict, at least in a short term, is impossible. Therefore, for individuals residing in states where abortion is banned, cross-state abortion may be the only option if they want to access abortion services. To shed light on removing the transportation barrier of cross-state abortion travel, this paper aims to design an on-demand transportation service system to provide a timely and cost-effective mode of transportation. Specifically, we firstly formulate cross-state abortion transportation as a Dual Dial-a-Ride Problem (D-DARP) with safe driving constraints to minimize total transportation costs. In the proposed model, “dual” means completing both pickup and delivery tasks before and after the abortion service appointment for each request. The safe driving constraints are considered by setting a maximum driving time limit beyond which the carrying vehicles must stop for passengers to have a rest for refreshment, food, restroom breaks, or other health-related needs. To solve the proposed model, we develop a Tabu Search algorithm. Two datasets are used in numerical experiments to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposed model and its solution algorithm.