Analysis of the inter-city shared mobility system based on autonomous electric vehicles

While autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) have been preliminarily implemented in shared travel services from both technical and theoretical perspectives, challenges such as dispersed fleets, limited service quality, and travel safety concerns have confined existing research to intra-city shared mobility, with few studies focusing on inter-city shared mobility for AEVs. With China's metropolitan regions expanding and intercity travel rapidly increasing, examining the use of shared autonomous electric vehicles (SAEVs) for intercity travel is essential for future transportation systems. To address this issue, this study models the inter-city shared mobility problem utilizing mixed integer linear programming. The problem is defined on a directed graph and addressed using a variable neighborhood search algorithm. Numerical experiments are designed based on the actual shared mobility data between Yinchuan and Shizuishan, Ningxia Province, China. From the perspective of the operating platform, the potential influencing factors of the inter-city shared mobility system are analyzed, including passenger travel demand, fleet size, vehicle range, and the number of charging stations. The results demonstrate that increasing temporal and spatial imbalance in passenger travel demand and excessive fleet size will lead to lower total revenue of the operation platform. Conversely, within certain thresholds, increasing the number of charging stations, vehicle range, and fleet size will increase the total revenue. Continuing to increase the number of charging stations and vehicle range has no significant effect on total revenue and service rate but will lead to a waste of basic resources. The study is expected to provide a solution for building an inter-city shared mobility system based on SAEVs. By fully understanding the system's limitations and advantages, we aim to provide a reference template for constructing future inter-city shared mobility systems.