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Serving both passenger and freight demand with the same vehicle fleet is an ambition that led to the development of several innovative vehicle concepts 10, 26. This study proposes a simulation-based methodology to investigate the execution of freight tours with an On-Demand fleet of autonomous, modular vehicles while giving priority to passenger transport. Based on assumptions regarding the operational scheme, tour pricing and delivery time windows, the software Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) is extended. The developed methodology is then applied to a Berlin-wide freight delivery scenario. The results show that when using a relatively large vehicle fleet, passenger waiting time statistics barely change. However, it has to be noted that the study should be repeated with different (smaller) fleet sizes. A rough cost analysis for the freight operator suggests that there is a large saving potential when using autonomous On-Demand vehicles instead of an owned fleet. Because of the uncertainty of price composition, further studies to quantify this saving potential have to be made.
Meinhardt et al. (Sat,) studied this question.