Designing an Optimal Autonomous Vehicle Sharing and Reservation System: A Linear Programming Approach

The autonomous vehicle (AV) technology holds great promise for improving efficiency of traditional vehicle sharing systems. In this paper, the authors examine a new vehicle sharing system using AVs, referred to as autonomous vehicle sharing and reservation (AVSR). In such a system, travelers can request AV trips ahead of time and the AVSR system controller will optimally arrange the AV pickup and delivery schedule and trip chains on the basis of the recorded trip demand requests. A linear programming model is proposed to efficiently solve for optimal solutions for AV trip chains. Case studies show that AVSR can significantly increase vehicle use rate (VUR) and consequentially reduce vehicle ownership significantly. In the meantime, it is found that the actual vehicle miles traveled (VMT) incurred by AVSR systems is not significantly more than that of conventional taxis, despite inevitable empty hauls for vehicle relocation in AVSR systems. This indicates that the increased VMT incurred by relocating sharing vehicles can be partially compensated by the reduction in required AV fleet size. The results imply potential huge benefits from AVSR systems on improving mobility and sustainability of our current transportation systems.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AHB30 Standing Committee on Vehicle-Highway Automation.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Ma, Jiaqi
  • 0000-0002-8184-5157
  • Li, Xiaopeng
  • Zhou, Fang
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 19p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Case studies; Intelligent vehicles; Linear programming; Optimization; Reservation systems; Trip chaining; Vehicle miles of travel; Vehicle sharing
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Vehicles and Equipment;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01628786
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-05157
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 13 2017 9:12AM