Abstract:
The development of autonomous vehicles, capable of peer-to-peer communication, as well as the interest in on-demand solutions, are the primary motivations for this study. In the absence of central control, we are interested in forming a fleet of autonomous vehicles capable of responding to city-scale travel demands. Typically, this problem is solved centrally; this implies that the vehicles have continuous access to a dispatching portal. However, such access to such a global switching infrastructure (for data collection and order delivery) is costly and represents a critical bottleneck. The idea is to use low-cost vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technologies to coordinate vehicles without a global communication infrastructure. We propose to model the different aspects of decision and optimization problems related to this more general problem. After modeling these problems, the question arises as to the choice of centralized and decentralized solution methods. Methodologically, we explore the directions and compare the performance of distributed constraint optimization techniques (DCOP), self-organized multi-agent techniques, market-based approaches, and centralized operations research solutions.
