Privately Owned Autonomous Vehicle Optimization Model Development and Integration with Activity-Based Modeling and Dynamic Traffic Assignment Framework

This paper presents a first-order approach integrated with activity-based modeling and dynamic traffic assignment framework to model the impact of autonomous vehicles on household travel and activity schedules. By considering shared rides among household members, mode choices, re-planning of departure times, and the rescheduling of activity sequences, two optimization models—basic personal owned autonomous vehicle (POAV) model and enhanced POAV model—are presented. The proposed approach is tested for the different models at the household level with different household sizes. The activity schedules of each household were generated in the Chicago sub-area network. The results show that each POAV can effectively replace multiple conventional vehicles, however, using POAV will lead to more vehicle miles traveled because of detour trips. The proposed enhanced POAV model considers mode choice decision with a household-based approach instead of a trip-based approach to capture the impacts of repositioning trips on mode choice. The results show that, if the generalized travel cost of POAV remains at the same level as conventional vehicles, more passengers will choose to use transit because the repositioning trips increase the total cost.