Make American Transportation Great Again: Autonomous Taxi Fleet Management Strategies

Abstract

As autonomous vehicle technology is becoming more of a reality, we must start preparing for a future where autonomous vehicles are part of everyday life. Self-driving cars will change how people access mobility and change the mobility structures that exist today. With the mass adoption of self-driving cars, individual car ownership will become unnecessary and vehicles will be operated as fleets of autonomous taxis (aTaxis). aTaxis also bring incredible opportunities for ridesharing, which will decrease vehicle miles traveled, and in turn decrease vehicular congestion and environmental pollution. Managing fleets of aTaxis will be drastically different than traditional taxi fleet management. Using a fleet of vehicles of varied sizes and a data set of synthesized travel demand for the state of New Jersey, this thesis analyzes the benefits of ridesharing for New Jersey and explores various fleet management strategies and the costs associated with these strategies. Ridesharing is able to increase average vehicle occupancy from 1 to 1.74 and reduces total vehicle miles traveled by 43%. Even in an upper bound case, the total number of vehicles needed to serve all of New Jersey's travel demand is less than 50% of the number of vehicles currently on the road today in New Jersey, which would have signi cant benefits in terms of congestion and pollution. Additionally, the research in this thesis extends well to optimal fleet sizing for an aTaxi fleet.