Booking Processes in Autonomous Carsharing and Taxi Systems

With the introduction of autonomous vehicles, ride-hailing, taxi, and carsharing might all become on-demand door-to-door mobility services. We assume that the carsharing mode will develop into a system with more flexibility for users while ride-hailing and taxi will focus on the efficiency of the system. The flexibility of the autonomous carsharing system can present itself in multiple ways, e.g. the option to drive manually, withhold the information of the final stop, freely choosing routes and stops, or reserving a vehicle for an unspecified amount of time. The more efficient autonomous taxi system requires user requests to contain the information of the destination and the operator has full control over the vehicles. We discuss some implications (vehicle-search and assignment, scaling, ridepooling and relocations) of the different systems qualitatively and show a numerical study of a small and large scale scenario reflecting the efficiency advantage of the autonomous taxi system.