Research Paper
Empty vehicle redistribution in autonomous taxi services

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13676-019-00146-5Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Abstract

In this article, we investigate empty vehicle redistribution algorithms for Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) or autonomous station-based taxi services, from a passenger service perspective. We present a new index-based redistribution (IBR) algorithm that improves upon existing nearest neighbour and indexing algorithms by incorporating expected passenger arrivals and predicted waiting times into the surplus/deficit index. We evaluate six variations of algorithms on a test case in Paris Saclay, France. The results show that especially the combination of Simple Nearest Neighbours + Index Based Redistribution provides promising results for both off-peak and rush-hour demand, outperforming the other methods tested, in terms of passenger waiting time (average and maximum) as well as station queue lengths.

Keywords

Empty vehicle redistribution
One-way car-sharing relocation
Empty vehicle management

Cited by (0)