Potential of Private Autonomous Vehicles for Parcel Delivery

Using the same vehicles for both passenger and freight transport, to increase vehicle occupancy and decrease their number, is an idea that drives transport planners and is also being addressed by manufacturers. This paper proposes a methodology to simulate the behavior of such vehicles within an urban traffic system and evaluate their performance. The aim is to investigate the impacts of resignation from fleet ownership by a transport service company (TSC) operating on a city-wide scale. In the simulation, the service provider hires private autonomous cars for tour performance. Based on assumptions concerning the operation of such vehicles and TSCs, the software Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) is extended to model vehicle and operator behavior. The proposed framework is applied to a case study of a parcel delivery service in Berlin serving a synthetic parcel demand. Results suggest that the vehicle miles traveled for freight purposes increase because of additional access and egress trips. Moreover, the number of vehicles en route is higher throughout the day. The lowering of driver costs can reduce the costs of the operator by approximately 74.5%. If the service provider additionally considers the resignation from fleet ownership, it might lower the operation cost by another 10%, not taking into account the costs of system transfer or risks like vehicle non-availability. From an economic perspective, the reduction of the overall number of vehicles in the system seems to be beneficial.