Routing and Rebalancing Intermodal Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems in Mixed Traffic

This paper studies congestion-aware route-planning policies for intermodal Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems, whereby a fleet of autonomous vehicles provides on-demand mobility jointly with public transit under mixed traffic conditions (consisting of AMoD and private vehicles). First, we devise a network flow model to jointly optimize the AMoD routing and rebalancing strategies in a congestion-aware fashion by accounting for the endogenous impact of AMoD flows on travel time. Second, we capture the effect of exogenous traffic stemming from private vehicles adapting to the AMoD flows in a user-centric fashion by leveraging a sequential approach. Since our results are in terms of link flows, we then provide algorithms to retrieve the explicit recommended routes to users. Finally, we showcase our framework with two case-studies considering the transportation sub-networks in Eastern Massachusetts and New York City, respectively. Our results suggest that for high levels of demand, pure AMoD travel can be detrimental due to the additional traffic stemming from its rebalancing flows. However, blending AMoD with public transit, walking and micromobility options can significantly improve the overall system performance by leveraging the high-throughput of public transit combined with the flexibility of walking and micromobility.

Automated summary

This paper explores congestion-aware route-planning policies for intermodal Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems, optimizing AMoD routing and rebalancing strategies to improve overall system performance under mixed traffic conditions.