Modeling and managing parking and vehicle sharing choices with autonomous vehicles

Abstract

<p>The development of automation technologies has triggered the possibilities of the autonomous vehicles (AVs) being employed by other commercial companies to provide mobility service and serve customers instead of usual parking, which might significantly change the current traveling patterns. This paper develops tractable models to characterize the travel, parking, and vehicle-sharing choices of AV users, optimize operation strategies of the mobility service platform considering AV sharing, and evaluate their system-wide impacts. In particular, given the operation strategies of the mobility service platform, we formulate the system equilibrium including the AV owners' choice equilibrium and the mobility service market equilibrium. Two different business formats, namely reselling and commissioning, are considered for the AV owners, where the owners can be either risk-neutral or risk-averse. We found that introducing the AV sharing scheme has the potential to yield a Win-Win-Win situation for AV owners, mobility service operator and users, where the social welfare is improved accordingly. Moreover, both a social welfare-maximizing operator and a profit-maximizing operator may yield a Win-Win-Win situation (under certain conditions). Under risk-averse AV owners, the reselling format is superior to the commissioning format; under risk-neutral AV owners, the reselling and commissioning formats can replicate each other (i.e., they can yield identical platform profit and social welfare). Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the analytical results and provide further understanding.</p>