Data-Driven Spatio-Temporal Scaling of Travel Times for AMoD Simulations

With the widespread adoption of mobility-on-demand (MoD) services and the advancements in autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, the research interest into the AVs based MoD (AMoD) services has grown immensely. Often agent-based simulation frameworks are used to study the AMoD services using the trip data of current Taxi or MoD services. For reliable results of AMoD simulations, a realistic city network and travel times play a crucial part. However, many times the researchers do not have access to the actual network state corresponding to the trip data used for AMoD simulations reducing the reliability of results. Therefore, this paper introduces a spatio-temporal optimization strategy for scaling the link-level network travel times using the simulated trip data without additional data sources on the network state. The method is tested on the widely used New York City (NYC) Taxi data and shows that the travel times produced using the scaled network are very close to the recorded travel times in the original data. Additionally, the paper studies the performance differences of AMoD simulation when the scaled network is used. The results indicate that realistic travel times can significantly impact AMoD simulation outcomes.