Abstract
In a coordinated mobility-on-demand system, a fleet of vehicles is controlled by a central unit and serves transportation requests in an on-demand fashion. An emerging field of research aims at finding the best way to operate these systems given certain targets, e.g., customer service level or the minimization of fleet distance. In this work, we introduce a new element of fleet operation: the assignment of idle vehicles to a limited set of parking spots. We present two different parking operating policies governing this process and then evaluate them individually and together on different parking space distributions. We show that even for a highly restricted number of available parking spaces, the system can perform quite well, even though the total fleet distance is increased by 20% and waiting time by 10%. With only one parking space available per vehicle, the waiting times can be reduced by 30% with 20% increase in total fleet distance. Our findings suggest that increasing the parking capacity beyond one parking space per vehicle does not bring additional benefits. Finally, we also highlight possible directions for future research such as to find the best distribution of parking spaces for a given mobility-on-demand system and city.
Highlights
In many cities, privately owned cars are a dominant mode of transport
The results suggest that a 85% reduction of the current estimated minimum of 1,369,576 parking spaces can be realized if all of these trips are served by an autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) system
We formally introduce the process of assigning staying vehicles to free parking spots as an element of a fleet operational policy that we call “parking operating policy”
Summary
Privately owned cars are a dominant mode of transport. Apart from their undeniable utility for transportation, cars require roads to drive, burn fuel, emit greenhouse gases and pollutants and cause congestion. Shoup [1] provides one of the first overviews of cruising for parking and Cookson and Pishue [2] estimate that drivers spend 65 to 107 driving hours a year searching a free parking spot in major Western cities. As every location that a car owner chooses to visit requires a parking spot, the land consumption of parking spaces is significant. Parking spaces consume about 14% of incorporated land [3]
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