Fleet-size-and-mix and operations management of autonomous e-vehicles in rural areas

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In contrast to urban areas, the amount of mobility services that are offered to people living in rural areas is quite limited. This is mostly because of the relatively low population density, which hampers economic operations of dense and frequent public transport services. Also car-sharing, ride-sharing, and alternative systems are hardly available because of the low average demand density. Therefore, the population in rural areas has to use privately-owned cars for fulfilling their mobility demands nowadays. At the same time, large distances between origins and destinations per trip cause a high individual mobility demand, which, in combination with little mobility offerings impacts the quality of life negatively in such regions. In the proposed research project, we want to investigate how to design an innovative mobility service system that offers mobility services by autonomous, electric vehicles in rural areas. We consider a platform-based mobility service system, where a company provides a fleet of such vehicles for a region and uses these vehicles for fulfilling customer requests. The project will focus on questions addressing a suitable dimensioning of vehicle fleets together with an effective vehicle operations management with the goal to establish an efficient mobility service system. The existing research on mobility systems with autonomous vehicles has concentrated on urban areas, where high demand density, large vehicle fleets, and short distances constitute completely differing conditions for mobility management compared to rural areas. The investigated systems are based on a reactive, ad-hoc fulfillment of requests that are announced on short notice. In contrast, the long distances in rural areas necessitate that customers communicate their requests in advance with a sufficient lead-time and that vehicle operations are planned in detail. For this purpose, the research project aims at developing optimization models and solution methods for the operations management of fleets of autonomous e-vehicles in rural areas and at answering questions regarding an appropriate fleet size and vehicle-mix. We will put attention on complex mobility services where, for example, a trip to some destination needs to be combined with a time-shifted return trip. These services demand a careful synchronization of service operations and vehicles. The methodology will furthermore support reservation mechanisms, reactive and proactive vehicle relocations, and order acceptance decisions. A simulation system will be developed for the identification of relevant system design options and for the evaluation of the performance of the resulting mobility service system.