Congestion-Aware Ride-Pooling in Mixed Traffic for Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems

This paper presents a modeling and optimization framework to study congestion-aware ride-pooling Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems, whereby self-driving robotaxis are providing on-demand mobility, and users headed in the same direction share the same vehicle for part of their journey. Specifically, taking a mesoscopic time-invariant perspective and on the assumption of a large number of travel requests, we first cast the joint ride-pooling assignment and routing problem as a quadratic program that does not scale with the number of demands and can be solved with off-the-shelf convex solvers. Second, we compare the proposed approach with a significantly simpler decoupled formulation, whereby only the routing is performed in a congestion-aware fashion, whilst the ride-pooling assignment part is congestion-unaware. A case study of Sioux Falls reveals that such a simplification does not significantly alter the solution and that the decisive factor is indeed the congestion-aware routing. Finally, we solve the latter problem accounting for the presence of user-centered private vehicle users in a case study of Manhattan, NYC, characterizing the performance of the car-network as a function of AMoD penetration rate and percentage of pooled rides within it. Our results show that AMoD can significantly reduce congestion and travel times, but only if at least 40% of the users are willing to be pooled together. Otherwise, for higher AMoD penetration rates and low percentage of pooled rides, the effect of the additional rebalancing empty-vehicle trips can be even more detrimental than the benefits stemming from a centralized routing, worsening congestion and leading to an up to 15% higher average travel time.