Multi-Agent Dynamic Routing of a Fleet of Cybercars

Due to the lack of efficient control methods for a fleet of vehicles throughout a road network, the large-scale application of cybercars, which are fully automatic road vehicles providing on-demand and door-to-door transportation service, is still hindered. Although the fleet control problem for cybercars can be straightforwardly addressed in a centralized control setting, for reasons of scalability and fast computation, a centralized control method will not be tractable for the large-scale use of cybercars in the future. In this paper, we focus on the dynamic routing of a fleet of cybercars considering minimization of the combined system cost including the total time spent and the total energy consumption by all cybercars. We first propose a model of the dynamics and the energy consumption of a fleet of cybercars based on a description of the dynamics of every single cybercar and the states of the road network. After that, we propose several tractable and scalable multi-agent control methods including multi-agent model predictive control and parameterized control for the dynamic routing of cybercars. Finally, experiments by means of numerical simulations illustrate the performance of the proposed control methods.