Autonomous Transportation and Connected Roads

Date: 11/18/2021

Speakers:

Alex Samoylov | Senior Research Scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute | LinkedIn

Betsy Plattenburg | 5G Enabled Autonomous Vehicle & Smart City Living Lab | LinkedIn

Srivinas Peeta | Chair and Professor, Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Daniel Cooksey | Division Chief, Sensor Intelligence & Visualization at Georgia Tech Research Institute | LinkedIn

Anton Kleywegt | Associate Professor, Georgia Tech School of Industrial and Environmental Engineering

Xinyu Liu | PhD Student in Operations Research at Georgia Tech | LinkedIn

Pickup and dropoff facilities have long been important to facilitate transportation to and from airports, sports facilities, and schools. The increased use of on-demand transportation, and the anticipated continuation of this increasing trend with the introduction of self-driving vehicles, imply that pickup and dropoff facilities will become more widespread and more important. The current practice of mostly using curbsides for pickups and dropoffs for on-demand rides will not be sustainable as demand increases. We evaluate the throughput capacities of different pickup and dropoff facility designs and show how the throughput is affected by variables such as mean service time, service time variance, mean times for vehicle maneuvers, variance of vehicle maneuver times, facility access controls, and boarding spot assignment policies.  The results show that facility access controls are of great importance when throughput is close to capacity, and that self-driving vehicles can increase capacity significantly by reducing the variance of vehicle maneuver times.