Integration of public transportation using autonomous vehicles

Abstract

While public transportation (PT) plays a critical role in urban mobility, the discomfort and the disutility of the last-mile trips make PT unattractive. We investigate the feasibility of shared autonomous vehicles (AV) in terms of providing an alternative on-demand transportation service for last-mile mobility to the conventional bus routes that have fixed routes and schedules. To this end, the bus routes that operate along the edges of the transportation network are selected. The origin and destination (OD) pairs of the trips made in these bus routes are inferred at an individual level. Then, the related vehicle routing problem is formulated by taking the characteristics of the proposed transportation service into consideration. Several solution methods are developed for both solution construction and solution improvement phases of the problem. An agent-based simulation framework is constructed to evaluate the performance of the solution methods with real-world data. The findings of the study indicate the success of the solution methods in solving a highly dynamic problem. The results show that the integration of PT using AVs is well-suited to improve the service quality in the last-mile mobility. The investment and the operational costs of the proposed transportation service are further analyzed and shown to be more advantageous than conventional buses with fixed routes.