Ride-pooling Electric Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand: Joint optimization of operations and fleet and infrastructure design

This paper presents a modeling and design optimization framework for an Electric Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand system that allows for ride-pooling, i.e., multiple users can be transported at the same time towards a similar direction to decrease vehicle hours traveled by the fleet at the cost of additional waiting time and delays caused by detours. In particular, we first devise a multi-layer time-invariant network flow model that jointly captures the position and state of charge of the vehicles. Second, we frame the time-optimal operational problem of the fleet, including charging and ride-pooling decisions as a mixed-integer linear program, whereby we jointly optimize the placement of the charging infrastructure. Finally, we perform a case-study using Manhattan taxi-data. Our results indicate that jointly optimizing the charging infrastructure placement allows to decrease overall energy consumption of the fleet and vehicle hours traveled by approximately 1% compared to a heuristic placement. Most significantly, ride-pooling can decrease such costs considerably more, and up to 45%. Finally, we investigate the impact of the vehicle choice on the energy consumption of the fleet, comparing a lightweight two-seater with a heavier four-seater, whereby our results show that the former and latter designs are most convenient for low- and high-demand areas, respectively.