An intelligent management system for relocating semi-autonomous shared vehicles

Car sharing services with Semi-Autonomous Electric Vehicles (SAEVs) represent an emerging transportation scheme which may comprise an important link in the green mobility chain for smart city operations. The main goal of the present paper is to introduce and develop an intelligent management system for the efficient relocation of SAEVs within the urban car-sharing context. A novel relocation strategy is analyzed regarding the upcoming technology of platooning. Considering real urban road networks for SAEVs, routing decisions are assessed based on the traffic conditions and energy efficiency. Fuzzy logic concepts are incorporated into the proposed system to simulate the uncertainty related to the roads' traffic conditions. The problem addressed in this work is a constrained optimization problem. Solutions to the addressed problem are yielded using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) in accordance with the fuzzy logic module. Simulated experiments over the city of Patras (Greece) show the efficiency of the developed approach.