View article

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of potential benefits of a fleet of shared autonomous 3 taxis “aTaxis”, in this paper referred to as Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAV)) when replacing private 4 car commuter trips in a metropolitan area. We develop a framework for dynamic allocation of SAVs to 5 passenger trips, empty-vehicle routing and multi-criteria evaluation with regard to passenger waiting time, 6 trip times and fleet size. Using a dynamic representation of current private vehicle demand for the 7 Stockholm metropolitan area and a detailed network representation, different scenarios (varying levels of 8 accepted passenger waiting time at origin and accepted% increase in travel time) are compared with 9 respect to passenger travel time, number of vehicles needed and vehicle mileage. The results indicate that 10 an SAV-based personal transport system has the potential to provide an on-demand door-to-door transport 11 with a high level of service, using 5% of today's private cars and parking places. In order to provide an 12 environmental benefit and to reduce total mileage, an SAV-based personal transport system requires users 13 to accept ride-sharing, allowing a maximum 30% increase of their travel time (13% on average) and a 14 start time window of 10 minutes. 15