Abstract
We are observing a disruption in the urban transportation worldwide. The number of cities offering shared-use on-demand mobility services is increasing rapidly. They promise sustainable and affordable personal mobility without a burden of owning a vehicle. Despite growing popularity, on-demand services, such as carsharing, remain niche products due to small scale and rebalancing issues. We are proposing an extension to the traditional carsharing, which is Autonomous Mobility on Demand (AMOD). AMOD provides a one-way carsharing with self- driving electric vehicles. Autonomous vehicles can make the carsharing more attractive to customers as they (i) reduce the operating cost, which is incurred when a manually driven system is unbalanced, and (ii) release people from the burden of driving.This study is built upon our previous work on Autonomous Mobility on Demand (AMOD) systems. Our methodology is simulation-based and we make use of SimMobility, an agent-based microscopic simulation platform. In the current work we focus on the framework for testing different rebalancing policies for the AMOD systems. We compare three different rebalancing methods: (i) no rebalancing, (ii) offline rebalancing, and (iii) online rebalancing. Simulation results indicate that rebalancing reduces the required fleet size and shortens the customers’ wait time.
Highlights
During the post-World War II period automobiles became more widespread, especially in the US
This work is built upon our work presented in [3, 4] and sets out to highlight importance of rebalancing for autonomous mobility on demand system
In the current work we focus on the framework for evaluating the impact of different rebalancing policies on the performance of the Autonomous Mobility on Demand (AMOD) system
Summary
During the post-World War II period automobiles became more widespread, especially in the US. The mass use of motor vehicles led to some unforeseen consequences in terms of congestion, pollution, safety and climate change This has spurred a growing interest in shared-use mobility— a one-way vehicle sharing—as a sustainable alternative to privately owned vehicles. One of the hopes for shared-use mobility is that it will reduce congestion and costly parking requirements Despite these prominent advantages, an inadequate and unbalanced fleet of shared vehicles can result in service unavailability problems, during periods of high demand. AMOD vehicles are demand-responsive, which means that they do not operate on a regular schedule like buses or trains, but rather only run when there is a request for the service This allows for a long- term environmental sustainability and potential cost savings for customers, while relieving people from the burden of driving. Autonomy could potentially increase safety as the road accidents are mainly caused by the human errors
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
