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As an emerging mode of urban transportation, autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) systems show the potential in improving mobility in cities through timely and door-to-door services. However, the spatiotemporal imbalances between mobility demand and supply may lead to inefficiencies and a low quality of service. Vehicle rebalancing (i.e., dispatching idle vehicles to high-demand areas) is a potential solution for efficient AMoD fleet management. In this article, we formulate the vehicle rebalancing problem as a coverage control problem for the deployment of a fleet of mobile agents for AMoD operation in urban areas. Performance is demonstrated via microscopic simulations representing a large urban road network in Shenzhen, China. The results reveal the potential of the proposed method in improving service rates and decreasing passenger waiting times.
Zhu et al. (Tue,) studied this question.