Optimal design of autonomous vehicle zones in transportation networks

•Certain areas of road networks can be dedicated to autonomous vehicles (AVs) only.•AV zones enable full utilization of the AV technology and further nurture the AV market.•A mathematical framework is developed for the optimal design of AV zones.•A novel network equilibrium model is proposed to capture mixed-routing behaviors.

This paper advocates the need for infrastructure planning to adapt to and further promote the deployment of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology. It is envisioned that in the future government agencies will dedicate certain areas of road networks to AVs only to facilitate the formulation of vehicle platoons to improve throughput and hopefully improve the performance of the whole network. This paper aims to present a mathematical framework for the optimal design of AV zones in a general network. With the presence of AV zones, AVs may apply different routing principles outside of and within the AV zones. A novel network equilibrium model (we refer to it as the “mixed routing equilibrium model”) is thus firstly proposed to capture such mixed-routing behaviors. We then proceed to formulate a mixed-integer bi-level programming model to optimize the deployment plan of AV zones. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed models.