Optimising fleet sizing and management of shared automated vehicle (SAV) services: A mixed-integer programming approach integrating endogenous demand, congestion effects, and accept/reject mechanism impacts

Shared automated vehicles (SAV) are expected to benefit the sustainable development of urban regions and alleviate the negative impacts brought by the increasing number of private cars. In this paper, we envision a future scenario where non-pooled SAVs replace private cars and provide public on-demand mobility services to satisfy the mobility needs of a city's residents. To help service providers make profitable fleet sizing and management decisions, we develop a mixed-integer non-linear programming model that considers the congestion effects and the mode choice of urban travellers in different income classes, between SAVs and bicycles. Our model optimises both strategic decisions (fleet size, initial fleet distribution, and service quality level) and operational decisions (trip assignment, vehicle routing, parking, and relocation). Travellers’ preference for both transport modes is described through a binary logit model and congestion effects are described by dynamically varying travel times with respect to traffic flow in a non-linear fashion. In addition, we investigate two types of accept/reject mechanisms (mandatory vs. non-mandatory acceptance) which lead to an endogenously determined acceptance rate that can affect travellers’ willingness to use SAV services. The computational challenge posed by the non-linear and non-convex nature of the model is addressed through reformulation and the use of outer-inner approximation methods combined with a breakpoint generation algorithm. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in a case study of the city of Delft in The Netherlands, as well as a scaling analysis on three toy networks with various sizes and demand profiles. A sensitivity analysis of key parameters is carried out to assess system performance. Computational results indicate that fleet sizing decisions are influenced not only by the population's geographical distribution and land use patterns but also by the pricing strategy, unit operating costs of the SAV fleet, network congestion level, and traveller behaviour. When the price rate of using SAVs is low, the fleet sizing decisions can also be influenced by the trip accept/reject mechanism and the travellers’ sensitivity to the service quality level. In addition, a low price of SAV service will attract more users but may not necessarily bring a higher profit because of the increased traffic congestion.