Title: Fleet management for autonomous vehicles: Online PDP under special constraints,
Abstract: The VIPAFLEET project consists in developing models and algorithms for man-
aging a fleet of Individual Public Autonomous Vehicles (VIPA). Hereby, we
consider a fleet of cars distributed at specified stations in an industrial
area to supply internal transportation, where the cars can be used in different
modes of circulation (tram mode, elevator mode, taxi mode). One goal is to
develop and implement suitable algorithms for each mode in order to satisfy all
the requests under an economic point of view by minimizing the total tour
length. The innovative idea and challenge of the project is to develop and
install a dynamic fleet management system that allows the operator to switch
between the different modes within the different periods of the day according
to the dynamic transportation demands of the users. We model the underlying
online transportation system and propose a correspond- ing fleet management
framework, to handle modes, demands and commands. We consider two modes of
circulation, tram and elevator mode, propose for each mode appropriate on- line
algorithms and evaluate their performance, both in terms of competitive
analysis and practical behavior.