Dwight David Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship Program Graduate Fellowship

My dissertation research (i.e. my research plan) focuses on modeling autonomous vehicle (AV) fleets. As their name suggests, AV fleets are fleets of driverless cars that are owned and operated by a single entity. The decision to examine fleets of AVs stems from recent reports that a number of companies plan to use AVs to provide transportation services to travelers rather than sell individual AVs to consumers. These companies include transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft, tech giants Google and Apple (rumored), and manufacturers such as General Motors (who is teaming up with Lyft) and Ford (rumored to be teaming up with Google). The fact that (a) all of these different companies plan to provide transportation services with AV fleets and (b) providing passenger transportation service with a fleet of centrally-operated, free-floating vehicles (let alone AVs) on a large scale has never been done before, suggests that a new framework needs to be developed to model AV fleets. Understanding and modeling the operations of AV fleets as well as developing algorithms to efficiently operate AV fleets is a challenging, extremely timely, and therefore worthwhile area of academic research.