TY - GEN
T1 - Overcoming mobility poverty with shared autonomous vehicles
T2 - 11th International Conference on Computational Logistics, ICCL 2020
AU - Beirigo, Breno
AU - Schulte, Frederik
AU - Negenborn, Rudy R.
N1 - Accepted Author Manuscript
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Residents of cities’ most disadvantaged areas face significant barriers to key life activities, such as employment, education, and healthcare, due to the lack of mobility options. Shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) create an opportunity to overcome this problem. By learning user demand patterns, SAV providers can improve regional service levels by applying anticipatory relocation strategies that take into consideration when and where requests are more likely to appear. The nature of transportation demand, however, invariably creates learning biases towards servicing cities’ most affluent and densely populated areas, where alternative mobility choices already abound. As a result, current disadvantaged regions may end up perpetually underserviced, therefore preventing all city residents from enjoying the benefits of autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems equally. In this study, we propose an anticipatory rebalancing policy based on an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) formulation that processes historical demand data to estimate value functions of future system states iteratively. We investigate to which extent manipulating cost settings, in terms of subsidies and penalties, can adjust the demand patterns naturally incorporated into value functions to improve service levels of disadvantaged areas. We show for a case study in the city of Rotterdam, The Netherlands, that the proposed method can harness these cost schemes to better cater to users departing from these disadvantaged areas, substantially outperforming myopic and reactive benchmark policies.
AB - Residents of cities’ most disadvantaged areas face significant barriers to key life activities, such as employment, education, and healthcare, due to the lack of mobility options. Shared autonomous vehicles (SAVs) create an opportunity to overcome this problem. By learning user demand patterns, SAV providers can improve regional service levels by applying anticipatory relocation strategies that take into consideration when and where requests are more likely to appear. The nature of transportation demand, however, invariably creates learning biases towards servicing cities’ most affluent and densely populated areas, where alternative mobility choices already abound. As a result, current disadvantaged regions may end up perpetually underserviced, therefore preventing all city residents from enjoying the benefits of autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems equally. In this study, we propose an anticipatory rebalancing policy based on an approximate dynamic programming (ADP) formulation that processes historical demand data to estimate value functions of future system states iteratively. We investigate to which extent manipulating cost settings, in terms of subsidies and penalties, can adjust the demand patterns naturally incorporated into value functions to improve service levels of disadvantaged areas. We show for a case study in the city of Rotterdam, The Netherlands, that the proposed method can harness these cost schemes to better cater to users departing from these disadvantaged areas, substantially outperforming myopic and reactive benchmark policies.
KW - Approximate dynamic programming
KW - Mobility poverty
KW - Shared autonomous vehicles
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85092249078&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-59747-4_32
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-59747-4_32
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85092249078
SN - 978-3-030-59746-7
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 492
EP - 506
BT - Computational Logistics
A2 - Lalla-Ruiz, Eduardo
A2 - Mes, Martijn
A2 - Voß, Stefan
PB - Springer
CY - Cham, Switzerland
Y2 - 28 September 2020 through 30 September 2020
ER -