Automated Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems, in which fleets of automated vehicles provide on-demand services, are expected to transform urban mobility systems. Motivated by the rapid development of AMoD services delivered by self-driving car companies, an agent-based model (ABM) has been developed to study the coexistence phenomena of multiple AMoD operators competing for customers. The ABM is used to investigate how changes in pricing strategies, assignment methods, and fleet sizes affect travelers’ choice of different AMoD services and the operating performance of competing operators in the case-study city of The Hague, in the Netherlands. Findings suggest that an optimal assignment algorithm can reduce the average waiting time by up to 24% compared to a simple heuristic algorithm. We also find that a larger fleet could increase demand but lead to higher waiting times for its users and higher travel times for competing operators’ users due to the added congestion. Notably, pricing strategies can significantly affect travelers’ choice of AMoD services, but the effect depends strongly on the time of the day. Low-priced AMoD services can provide high service levels and effectively attract more demand, with up to 64.7% of customers choosing the very early morning service [5:30 AM,7:20 AM]. In the subsequent morning hours, high-priced AMoD services are more competitive in attracting customers as more idle vehicles are available. Based on the quantitative analysis, policies are recommended for the government and service operators.

This paper aims to explore the performance of the autonomous mobility-on-demand system (AMoD) with the coordinated formation of vehicle platooning. In this study, an agent-based model (ABM) is developed to explicitly simulate the operations of platooning formation and interactions between shared automated vehicles (SAVs) and real-time travel requests. The objective is to capture the real-time behavior of SAVs as trip makers, and then assess the performance of the AMoD system with the mechanism of coordinated formation of platoons. We conclude that the impact of vehicle assignment strategies in the AMoD system with vehicle platooning formation predominately affects the average waiting time and system capacity to transport travelers as a whole; however, vehicle platooning, to some extent, could lengthen the travel time of platoon vehicles. The hold-on time (imposed delay) of leading vehicles in order to form a platoon could affect the average time delay of vehicles part of those platoons. The developed ABM provides the first insight into the impact of the pervasive formation of vehicle platooning on the performance of the AMoD system.

Automated vehicles used as public transport show a great promise of revolutionizing current transportation systems. Still, there are many questions as to how these systems should be organized and operated in cities to bring the best out of future services. In this study, an agent-based model (ABM) is developed to simulate the on-demand operations of shared automated vehicles (SAVs) in a parallel transit service (PTS) and a tailored time-varying transit service (TVTS). The proposed TVTS system can switch service schemes between a door-to-door service (DDS) and a station-to-station service (SSS) according to what is best for the service providers and the travelers. In addition, the proposed PTS system that allows DDS and SSS to operate simultaneously is simulated. To test the conceptual design of the proposed SAV system, simulation experiments are performed in a hypothetical urban area to show the potential of different SAV schemes. Simulation results suggest that SAV systems together with dynamic ridesharing can significantly reduce average waiting time, the vehicle kilometres travelled and empty SAV trips. Moreover, the proposed optimal vehicle assignment algorithm can significantly reduce the empty vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) for the pickups for all tested SAV systems up to about 40% and improve the system capacity for transporting the passengers. Comparing the TVTS system, which has inconvenient access in peak hours, with the PTS systems, which always makes available door-to-door transport, we conclude that the latter could achieve a similar system performance as the former in terms of average waiting time, service time and system capacity.