A car sharing system for urban areas with fully automated personal vehicles

The paper concerns a transport system for pedestrian areas, based on a fleet of fully-automated Personal Intelligent Accessible Vehicles (PICAVs). Vehicles are available in stations and are shared through the day by different users. The following specific services are provided: instant access, open ended reservation and one way trips. All these features provide users with high flexibility, but create a problem of uneven distribution of vehicles between the stations. Therefore, relocation must be performed. A management strategy based on fully automated vehicles is proposed. To check the performance of the proposed management strategy, an object-oriented simulator has been developed. The simulator gives as an output the transport system performance, in terms of Level Of Service provided to users and of efficiency from the management point of view. The proposed transport system has been simulated for the historical city centre of Genoa, Italy.