Designing autonomous vehicle incentive program with uncertain vehicle purchase price

Abstract

This study proposes an autonomous vehicle incentive program design (AV-IPD) problem for a local government, which aims to promote the adoption of autonomous vehicles (AVs) by deploying AV lanes and subsidizing the purchase of AVs with the objective of system optimum subject to a fixed budget. As it is difficult to anticipate the changing AV market conditions in the future, we take into account the uncertainty in AV purchase price. For the AV-IPD problem, we firstly decide which regular lanes should be converted into exclusive AV lanes. Secondly, we determine the AV purchase subsidy for each realization of AV purchase price with a given AV lane deployment scheme. A binary logit model is applied to characterize the vehicle choice behavior of users. The AV-IPD problem is formulated as a two-stage stochastic programming model with equilibrium constraints. To solve the AV-IPD problem, we develop a solution method based on linear approximation techniques and duality theories. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and solution method.