The planning process of transport tasks for autonomous vans

Abstract

Recently, we have seen an increase in interest in autonomous mobility around the world. Autonomous vehicles have enormous potential, and the development of radar, information, communication, and measurement technologies brings us closer and closer to this type of mobility. This article considers the principles of planning and selecting routes for transport tasks. The research on the values of indicators characterizing the transport process was carried out for a simple case, when vehicles move along a fixed route without disturbances. The research used mathematical modelling based on the theory of Markov random systems to determine the capacity of the system, the average length of the queue for service, and the average number of transport tasks. The simulations were carried out for the assumed number of vehicles m = 15 and for points requiring service N = 40. The ranges were obtained wherein the number of occupied vehicles oscillated around 30% (for ρ = 0.1), when all the vehicles were occupied (for ρ = 0.625), and when the system became inefficient.

Keywords

• autonomous vehicles
• transport planning
• probabilistic evaluation
• vehicle routing problem