Autonomous Vehicles Empty Cruising Impact on Parking Dynamics

As development and utilization of autonomous vehicles is gaining momentum, it is expected to be decades of mixed environment where autonomous and human-driven vehicles will co-exist. Autonomous vehicles' ability to perform empty cruising can impact the parking dynamics of such a mixed environment and potentially release the parking spaces to be used by other vehicles. However, this release comes at the cost of higher vehicle kilometers travelled as the space occupation of autonomous vehicles performing empty cruising shifts from parking spaces to road spaces. Therefore, there is a trade-off between the empty cruising impact on parking search and total vehicle kilometers travelled. In this research we performed an experimental evaluation to determine how empty cruising impacts the parking search in a mixed environment in terms of frequency, duration and distance, and what is the trade-off between these changes with vehicles kilometers travelled. These key performance indicators are measured for human driven vehicles, autonomous vehicles, and also the total number of vehicles in the network to provide an in-depth insight on parking dynamics in a mixed environment. The results indicate that the fluctuation of the aforementioned key performance indicators differ based on the empty cruising duration. However, the highest impact on parking dynamics is observed at the early stages of empty cruising. Such detailed analysis of empty cruising impact on parking dynamics can enable the urban planners to better identify the optimal duration limit of empty cruising to create an equilibrium between parking demand and vehicle kilometers travelled.