Overcoming mobility poverty with shared autonomous vehicles

Overcoming mobility poverty with shared autonomous vehicles: A learning-based optimization approach for Rotterdam Zuid

Alves Beirigo, B. (TU Delft Transport Engineering and Logistics)
Schulte, F. (TU Delft Transport Engineering and Logistics)
Negenborn, R.R. (TU Delft Transport Engineering and Logistics)

Lalla-Ruiz, Eduardo (editor)
Mes, Martijn (editor)
Voß, Stefan (editor)

2020

Residents of cities’ most disadvantaged areas face significant barriers to key life activities, such as employment, education, and healthcare, due to the lack of mobility options. Shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) create an opportunity to overcome this problem. By learning user demand patterns, SAV providers can improve regional service levels by applying anticipatory relocation strategies that take into consideration when and where requests are more likely to appear. The nature of transportation demand, however, invariably creates learning biases towards servicing cities’ most affluent and densely populated areas, where alternative mobility choices already abound. As a result, current disadvantaged regions may end up perpetually underserviced, therefore preventing all city residents from enjoying the benefits of autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems equally. In this study, we propose an anticipatory rebalancing policy based on an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) formulation that processes historical demand data to estimate value functions of future system states iteratively. We investigate to which extent manipulating cost settings, in terms of subsidies and penalties, can adjust the demand patterns naturally incorporated into value functions to improve service levels of disadvantaged areas. We show for a case study in the city of Rotterdam, The Netherlands, that the proposed method can harness these cost schemes to better cater to users departing from these disadvantaged areas, substantially outperforming myopic and reactive benchmark policies.

Approximate dynamic programming
Mobility poverty
Shared autonomous vehicles

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b6129149-d644-4760-bb14-b08f4802159a

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59747-4_32

Springer, Cham, Switzerland

2021-03-22

978-3-030-59746-7

Computational Logistics: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference, ICCL 2020

11th International Conference on Computational Logistics, ICCL 2020, 2020-09-28 → 2020-09-30, Enschede, Netherlands

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 0302-9743, 12433

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2020 B. Alves Beirigo, F. Schulte, R.R. Negenborn