Modeling of the dynamics and the energy consumption of a fleet of cybercars

Automated driving technologies have already been developed for individual vehicles. However, the lack of efficient control strategies for the cooperation of a fleet of vehicles is one of the biggest challenges that cybercars (i.e., fully automatic road vehicles providing on-demand and door-to-door transportation service) are facing. Before an efficient fleet control method can be developed, a reasonably accurate and sufficiently fast model of the dynamics of a fleet of cybercars that is suited for control design is needed. In this paper, we discuss the modeling of the dynamics of a fleet of cybercars in a dedicated road network using a discrete-time modeling description. We consider the total time spent and total energy consumption by all the cybercars in the network and derive how these can be affected by the route choices.