Fleet management for autonomous vehicles using flows in time-expanded networks

The VIPAFLEET project aims at developing a framework to manage a fleet of Individual Public Autonomous Vehicles (VIPA). We consider a fleet of such cars distributed at specified stations in an industrial area to supply internal transportation, where the cars can be used in different modes of circulation (tram mode, elevator mode, taxi mode). We treat in this paper the pickup and delivery problem related to the taxi mode by means of flows in time-expanded networks. We compute optimal offline solutions, propose a replan strategy for the online situation, and evaluate its performance in comparison with the optimal offline solution.