Autonomous Shuttle-as-a-Service (ASaaS): Challenges, Opportunities, and
Social Implications
Abstract
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
Modern cities are composed of complex socio-technical systems that exist
to provide services effectively to their residents and visitors. In this
context, smart mobility systems aim to support the efficient
exploitation of the city transport facilities as well as sustainable
mobility within the urban environment. People need to travel quickly and
conveniently between locations at different scales, ranging from a trip
of a few blocks within a city to a journey across cities or further. At
the same time, goods need to be timely delivered considering the needs
of both the users and the businesses. While most of the
mobility and delivery solutions can cover significant distances and
multiple requests, they suffer when the requests come from the growing
neighborhoods and hard-to-reach areas such as city centers, corporate
headquarters, and hospitals. In the last few years, several cities
indicated interest in using Autonomous Vehicles (AV) for the
“last-mile” mobility services. With them, it seems to be easier to get
people and goods around using fewer vehicles.
In this context, Autonomous Shuttles (AS) are beginning to be thought of
as a new mobility/delivery service into the city center where narrow
streets are not easily served by traditional buses. They allow them to
serve critical areas with minimal new infrastructure and reducing noise
and pollution. The goal of this article is to present an innovative
vision on the introduction of
p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Helvetica}
the Autonomous Shuttles-as-a service (ASaaS) concept as the key pillar
for the realization of innovative and sustainable proximity mobility.
Through a set of real application scenarios, we present our view, and we
discuss a set of challenges, opportunities, and social implications that
this way to reimage the mobility of the future introduces.