Simulation of On-Demand Vehicles that Serve both Person and Freight Transport
Simon Meinhardt, Tilmann Schlenther, Kai Martins-Turner, M. Maciejewski
Abstract
Serving both passenger and freight demand with the same vehicle fleet is an ambition that led to the development of several innovative vehicle concepts [10, 26]. This study proposes a simulation-based methodology to investigate the execution of freight tours with an On-Demand fleet of autonomous, modular vehicles while giving priority to passenger transport. Based on assumptions regarding the operational scheme, tour pricing and delivery time windows, the software Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) is extended. The developed methodology is then applied to a Berlin-wide freight delivery scenario. The results show that when using a relatively large vehicle fleet, passenger waiting time statistics barely change. However, it has to be noted that the study should be repeated with different (smaller) fleet sizes. A rough cost analysis for the freight operator suggests that there is a large saving potential when using autonomous On-Demand vehicles instead of an owned fleet. Because of the uncertainty of price composition, further studies to quantify this saving potential have to be made.