The Impact of Parking on the Use of Autonomous Vehicles in Urban Delivery

On average, a driver spends nine minutes per search of a parking spot which accumulates to approximately 17 hours a year.  Thus,  delivery companies are actively looking for alternatives in urban areas and are considering ideas such as drones and sidewalk robots.  Another idea is the use of autonomous vehicles because they are able to remain in continuous use. One model has the self-driving vehicle drop a delivery person off and pick him/her up after each set of deliveries is made.  We model this variant to gain insight into the value of autonomous vehicles to improve delivery efficiency, particularly through the ability to avoid the need to find parking.  This talk introduces the Capacitated Autonomous Vehicle Assisted Delivery Problem (CAVADP).  We model and provide an analytical solution to the CAVADP on a complete grid, which can represent a downtown environment.  We also discuss experimental results when compared with the Capacitated Delivery Problem with Parking (CDPP).  We are able to demonstrate significant changes in cost and structure of the optimal solutions.  The talk will conclude with a discussion of our planned future work in this area.

Ann Melissa Campbell is the Tippie Professor of Management Sciences at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa.  She holds a PhD in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology.  Her research activities focus on the development of solution techniques for new and emerging freight transportation problems, such as same day delivery, emissions reduction for routing, and the use of autonomous vehicles for deliveries.  She is the president-elect of the Transportation Science and Logistics Society of INFORMS and has won an NSF CAREER award.  She serves as the PhD coordinator for the Department of Management Sciences at Iowa and is the author of many papers published in Transportation Science and EJOR, among other journals.