Operations of a shared, autonomous, electric vehicle fleet: Implications of vehicle & charging infrastructure decisions: Fid-Bau Portal

Operations of a shared, autonomous, electric vehicle fleet: Implications of vehicle & charging infrastructure decisions

Chen, T. Donna / Kockelman, Kara M. / Hanna, Josiah P.

Highlights • Agent-based model simulates fleet of shared, electric, autonomous vehicles (SAEVs). • Vehicle and charging scenarios show tradeoffs between investment and operations. • Each SAEV can replace 3.7–6.8 privately owned vehicles. • Results suggest SAEV operational costs are most sensitive to vehicle capital costs. • SAEV cost-competitiveness to non-electric vehicles hinges on recharging automation.

Abstract There are natural synergies between shared autonomous vehicle (AV) fleets and electric vehicle (EV) technology, since fleets of AVs resolve the practical limitations of today’s non-autonomous EVs, including traveler range anxiety, access to charging infrastructure, and charging time management. Fleet-managed AVs relieve such concerns, managing range and charging activities based on real-time trip demand and established charging-station locations, as demonstrated in this paper. This work explores the management of a fleet of shared autonomous electric vehicles (SAEVs) in a regional, discrete-time, agent-based model. The simulation examines the operation of SAEVs under various vehicle range and charging infrastructure scenarios in a gridded city modeled roughly after the densities of Austin, Texas. Results based on 2009 NHTS trip distance and time-of-day distributions indicate that fleet size is sensitive to battery recharge time and vehicle range, with each 80-mile range SAEV replacing 3.7 privately owned vehicles and each 200-mile range SAEV replacing 5.5 privately owned vehicles, under Level II (240-volt AC) charging. With Level III 480-volt DC fast-charging infrastructure in place, these ratios rise to 5.4 vehicles for the 80-mile range SAEV and 6.8 vehicles for the 200-mile range SAEV. SAEVs can serve 96–98% of trip requests with average wait times between 7 and 10minutes per trip. However, due to the need to travel while “empty” for charging and passenger pick-up, SAEV fleets are predicted to generate an additional 7.1–14.0% of travel miles. Financial analysis suggests that the combined cost of charging infrastructure, vehicle capital and maintenance, electricity, insurance, and registration for a fleet of SAEVs ranges from $0.42 to $0.49 per occupied mile traveled, which implies SAEV service can be offered at the equivalent per-mile cost of private vehicle ownership for low-mileage households, and thus be competitive with current manually-driven carsharing services and significantly cheaper than on-demand driver-operated transportation services. When Austin-specific trip patterns (with more concentrated trip origins and destinations) are introduced in a final case study, the simulation predicts a decrease in fleet “empty” vehicle-miles (down to 3–4% of all SAEV travel) and average wait times (ranging from 2 to 4minutes per trip), with each SAEV replacing 5–9 privately owned vehicles.