Effective evaluation of autonomous taxi fleets

Overview & Synopsis

With the advent of autonomous vehicles, self-management of taxis fleet becomes an important issue for the automotive industry. Designing strategies for taxis turns out to be a difficult task due to a large number of parameters and metrics involved. Performance evaluation of these strategies is also a complex problem since effectiveness in some configurations may become inefficiency in others. After formalizing this problem we propose several strategies based on swarm-computing techniques. Finally, we show that metric unification is necessary and that only a multi-criterion approach illustrated by an economic analysis allows a comparison. We conclude with a description of the simulator implemented and some examples showing the measurements made with the proposed strategies.