Congestion-Aware Operation of Coordinated Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems

With the advent of self-driving cars, Autonomous Mobility on Demand (AMoD) may become a very popular mode of transport in the near future because of its low price, convenience and other benefits. This study will explore the congestion effect of introducing a large fleet of autonomous vehicles to cities on a realistic simulation environment and will develop congestion-aware operation strategies for the fleet decision-making process. Refuting some previous results, our results show that replacing private car trips with AMoD rides can improve the overall traffic condition if a good operating strategy is used. Furthermore, our results also indicate that traffic can still be improved when only a fraction of the private car trips are replaced by AMoD rides. The higher the replacement rate is, the better the overall traffic will be. The study concludes with the identification of multiple future research directions that may bring us one step closer to the mobility of future.