On the use of reservation-based autonomous vehicles for demand management

Raphaël Lamotte, André de Palma () and Nikolas Geroliminis

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, 2017, vol. 99, issue C, 205-227

Abstract: Automated mobility on demand is foreseen as the future of urban passenger mobility. While mixed-traffic for autonomous and conventional vehicles could be considered, separation amplifies the benefits of automation. Combined with mobility as a service, separation also opens new possibilities in terms of demand management. We consider in this paper a single bottleneck dynamic framework, in which the capacity of a freeway is dedicated either to conventional or to autonomous vehicles. Users of conventional vehicles freely choose their departure time from home and compete for the best departure times from the bottleneck. Users of autonomous vehicles need to book their trip in advance. As the number of time slots available for booking does not exceed the capacity, booking users are guaranteed no delay at the bottleneck. An individual-specific cooperation cost is introduced in the modeling framework. We then investigate how a central planner should allocate the capacity to these two vehicle types depending on the regime (laissez-faire, welfare- or profit-maximizing). Two major findings are that the equilibrium demand split Pareto-dominates the case with only conventional cars and that the social cost difference between equilibrium and socially optimal demand splits is small compared to their benefits. Although the Pareto-improvement result may not hold for every single user in the case of richer heterogeneity, it remains a key advantage of our booking scheme. Profit-maximizing strategies however turn out to be hardly compatible with welfare maximization.

Keywords: Autonomous vehicle; Car-sharing; Vickrey’s bottleneck; Advance booking; Scheduling; Stackelberg equilibrium (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191261516300339
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transb:v:99:y:2017:i:c:p:205-227

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.trb.2017.01.003

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part B: Methodological is currently edited by Fred Mannering

More articles in Transportation Research Part B: Methodological from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().