skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: The Impact of Optimized Fleets in Transportation Networks
Connected technologies have engendered a paradigm shift in mobility systems by enabling digital platforms to coordinate large sets of vehicles in real time. Recent research has investigated how a small number of connected vehicles may be coordinated to reduce total system cost. However, platforms may coordinate vehicles to optimize a fleet-wide objective which is neither user nor system optimal. We study the behavior of optimized fleets in mixed traffic and find that, at small penetrations, fleets may worsen system cost relative to user equilibrium, and provide a concrete example of this paradox. Past a critical penetration level, however, optimized fleets reduce system cost in the network, up to achieving system optimal traffic flow, without need for an external subsidy. We introduce two novel notions of fleet-optimal mixed equilibria: critical fleet size for user equilibrium (CFS-UE) and critical fleet size for system optimum (CFS-SO). We demonstrate on the Sioux Falls and Pittsburgh networks that 33% and 83% of vehicles, respectively, must participate in the fleet to achieve system optimum. In Pittsburgh, we find that, although fleets permeate the network, they accumulate on highways and major arterials; the majority of origin-destination pairs are either occupied exclusively by users or by the fleet. Critical fleet size offers regulators greater insight into where fleet and system interests align, transportation planners a novel metric to evaluate road improvements, and fleet coordinators a better understanding of their efforts to optimize their fleet. History: This paper has been accepted for the Transportation Science Special Issue on Emerging Topics in Transportation Science and Logistics. Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Transportation [Mobility21] and the National Science Foundation [CMMI-1931827]. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2022.1189 .  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1931827
PAR ID:
10482295
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Publisher / Repository:
INFORMS
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Transportation Science
Volume:
57
Issue:
4
ISSN:
0041-1655
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1047 to 1068
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    This paper studies congestion-aware route- planning policies for Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems, whereby a fleet of autonomous vehicles provides on- demand mobility under mixed traffic conditions. Specifically, we first devise a network flow model to optimize the AMoD routing and rebalancing strategies in a congestion-aware fashion by accounting for the endogenous impact of AMoD flows on travel time. Second, we capture reactive exogenous traffic consisting of private vehicles selfishly adapting to the AMoD flows in a user- centric fashion by leveraging an iterative approach. Finally, we showcase the effectiveness of our framework with a case- study considering the transportation sub-network in New York City. Our results suggest that for high levels of demand, pure AMoD travel can be detrimental due to the additional traffic stemming from its rebalancing flows, whilst the combination of AMoD with walking or micromobility options can significantly improve the overall system performance. 
    more » « less
  2. Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) provide various valuable and advanced services to manufacturers, owners, mobility service providers, and transportation authorities. As a result, a large number of CAV applications have been proposed to improve the safety, mobility, and sustainability of the transportation system. With the increasing connectivity and automation, cybersecurity of the connected and automated transportation system (CATS) has raised attention to the transportation community in recent years. Vulnerabilities in CAVs can lead to breakdowns in the transportation system and compromise safety (e.g., causing crashes), performance (e.g., increasing congestion and reducing capacity), and fairness (e.g., vehicles fooling traffic signals). This paper presents our perspective on CATS cybersecurity via surveying recent pertinent studies focusing on the transportation system level, ranging from individual and multiple vehicles to the traffic network (including infrastructure). It also highlights threat analysis and risk assessment (TARA) tools and evaluation platforms, particularly for analyzing the CATS cybersecurity problem. Finally, this paper will provide valuable insights into developing secure CAV applications and investigating remaining open cybersecurity challenges that must be addressed. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    The emergence of the sharing economy in urban transportation networks has enabled new fast, convenient and accessible mobility services referred to as Mobilty-on-Demand systems (e.g., Uber, Lyft, DiDi). These platforms have flourished in the last decade around the globe and face many operational challenges in order to be competitive and provide good quality of service. A crucial step in the effective operation of these systems is to reduce customers' waiting time while properly selecting the optimal fleet size and pricing policy. In this paper, we jointly tackle three operational decisions: (i) fleet size, (ii) pricing, and (iii) rebalancing, in order to maximize the platform's profit or its customers' welfare. To accomplish this, we first devise an optimization framework which gives rise to a static policy. Then, we elaborate and propose dynamic policies that are more responsive to perturbations such as unexpected increases in demand. We test this framework in a simulation environment using three case studies and leveraging traffic flow and taxi data from Eastern Massachusetts, New York City, and Chicago. Our results show that solving the problem jointly could increase profits between 1% and up to 50%, depending on the benchmark. Moreover, we observe that the proposed fleet size yield utilization of the vehicles in the fleet is around 75% compared to private vehicle utilization of 5%. 
    more » « less
  4. With the trend of vehicles becoming increasingly connected and potentially autonomous, vehicles are being equipped with rich sensing and communication devices. Various vehicular services based on shared real-time sensor data of vehicles from a fleet have been proposed to improve the urban efficiency, e.g., HD-live map, and traffic accident recovery. However, due to the high cost of data uploading (e.g., monthly fees for a cellular network), it would be impractical to make all well-equipped vehicles to upload real-time sensor data constantly. To better utilize these limited uploading resources and achieve an optimal road segment sensing coverage, we present a real-time sensing task scheduling framework, i.e., RISC, for Resource-Constraint modeling for urban sensing by scheduling sensing tasks of commercial vehicles with sensors based on the predictability of vehicles' mobility patterns. In particular, we utilize the commercial vehicles, including taxicabs, buses, and logistics trucks as mobile sensors to sense urban phenomena, e.g., traffic, by using the equipped vehicular sensors, e.g., dash-cam, lidar, automotive radar, etc. We implement RISC on a Chinese city Shenzhen with one-month real-world data from (i) a taxi fleet with 14 thousand vehicles; (ii) a bus fleet with 13 thousand vehicles; (iii) a truck fleet with 4 thousand vehicles. Further, we design an application, i.e., track suspect vehicles (e.g., hit-and-run vehicles), to evaluate the performance of RISC on the urban sensing aspect based on the data from a regular vehicle (i.e., personal car) fleet with 11 thousand vehicles. The evaluation results show that compared to the state-of-the-art solutions, we improved sensing coverage (i.e., the number of road segments covered by sensing vehicles) by 10% on average. 
    more » « less
  5. As electric vehicles (EVs) gradually replace fuel vehicles and provide transportation services in cities, e.g., electric taxi fleets, solar-powered charging stations with energy storage systems have been deployed to provide charging services for EV fleets. The mixture of solar-powered and traditional charging stations brings efficiency challenges to charging stations and reliability challenges to power systems. In this article, we explore e-taxis’ mobility and charging demand flexibility to co-optimize service quality of e-taxi fleets and system cost of charging infrastructures, e.g., solar power under-utilization and reliability issues of power distribution networks due to reverse power flow. We propose SAC, an e-taxi coordination framework to dispatch e-taxis for charging or serving passengers under spatial-temporal dynamics of renewable energy and passenger mobility, which integrates the renewable power generation estimation from a forecast system. Moreover, we extend our design to a stochastic Model Predictive Control problem to handle the uncertainty of solar power generation, aiming to fully utilize generated solar power. Our data-driven evaluation shows that SAC significantly outperforms existing solutions, enhancing the usage rate of solar power by up to 172.6%, while maintaining e-taxi service quality with very small overhead, i.e., reducing the supply-demand ratio by 2.2%. 
    more » « less