Fleet management for autonomous vehicles: Online PDP under special constraints

摘要

The VIPAFLEET project consists in developing models and algorithms for man-aging a fleet of Individual Public Autonomous Vehicles (VIPA). Hereby, weconsider a fleet of cars distributed at specified stations in an industrialarea to supply internal transportation, where the cars can be used in differentmodes of circulation (tram mode, elevator mode, taxi mode). One goal is todevelop and implement suitable algorithms for each mode in order to satisfy allthe requests under an economic point of view by minimizing the total tourlength. The innovative idea and challenge of the project is to develop andinstall a dynamic fleet management system that allows the operator to switchbetween the different modes within the different periods of the day accordingto the dynamic transportation demands of the users. We model the underlyingonline transportation system and propose a correspond- ing fleet managementframework, to handle modes, demands and commands. We consider two modes ofcirculation, tram and elevator mode, propose for each mode appropriate on- linealgorithms and evaluate their performance, both in terms of competitiveanalysis and practical behavior.