Centralized fleet management system for cybernetic transportation

In this article, we present a centralized fleet management system (CFMS) for cybernetic vehicles called cybercars. Cybercars are automatically guided vehicles for passenger transport on dedicated networks like amusement parks, shopping centres etc. The users make reservations for the vehicles through phone, internet, kiosk etc and the CFMS schedules the cybercars to pick the users at their respective stations at desired time intervals. The CFMS has centralized control of the routing network and performs pooling of customer requests, scheduling and routing of cybercars to customers, empty cybercars to new services or parking stations and those running below their threshold battery levels to recharging stations. The challenges before CFMS are to assure conflict-free routing, accommodate immediate requests from customers, dynamic updation of vehicle paths and minimize congestion on the whole network. We present the approaches used by CFMS to ensure these functionalities and demonstrate a numerical illustration on a test network.