A Public Vehicle System with Multiple Origin-Destination Pairs on Traffic Networks

Substantial technology advances have been made in areas of autonomous and connected vehicles, which opens a wide landscape for future transportation systems. We propose a new type of transportation system, Public Vehicle (PV) system, to provide effective, comfortable, and convenient service. The PV system is to improve the efficiency of current transportation systems, \eg, taxi system. Meanwhile, the design of such a system targets on significant reduction in energy consumption, traffic congestion, and provides solutions with affordable cost. The key issue of implementing an effective PV system is to design efficient scheduling algorithms. We formulate it as the PV Path (PVP) problem, and prove it is NP-Complete. Then we introduce a real time approach, which is based on solutions of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and it can serve people efficiently with lower costs. Our results show that to achieve the same performance (e.g., the total time: waiting and travel time), the number of vehicles can be reduced by 47%-69%, compared with taxis. The number of vehicles on roads is reduced, thus traffic congestion is relieved.