Joint Charging Infrastructure and Autonomous Fleet Planning Considering Distributed Renewable Resources

Considering its unique operational characteristics, the autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) system is playing a more and more critical role in the future transportation system. In this article, we consider a joint planning problem of autonomous fleet (i.e., vehicle type and fleet size) and charging infrastructure (i.e., the size of charging piles with various charging rates, distributed renewable resources) while accounting for the spatial–temporal demand-side flexibility of the AMoD system. We adopt an augmented network flow model to capture the autonomous fleet's charging, order serving, and rebalancing decisions. The proposed planning problem is modeled as a two-stage stochastic program and solved by multicut Benders decomposition techniques. Simulation experiments based on real-world data are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed planning scheme.