Exploring the performance of autonomous mobility on-demand systems under demand uncertainty

This paper aims to explore the performance of Autonomous Mobility on-Demand (AMoD) systems under uncertain travel demands in an urban environment using a case study of Melbourne, Australia. The results of the simulation model developed in this study showed that an AMoD system could reduce the current fleet size by 84% while still meeting the same demand for travel. This, however, comes at a cost of more Vehicle-Kilometres Travelled (VKT). The increase in VKT is significant and amounts to around 77% for scenarios in which the vehicles are used in car-sharing systems, and 29% for the scenarios in which vehicles are used as ride-sharing systems. These findings show that the benefits reported in other studies have mainly been overestimated. The current study has also discovered a strong quadratic relationship between AMoD fleet size and VKT.