UC Riverside

Autonomous vehicle (as known as self-driving vehicle) brings up new challenges in sensing and navigating. As far as navigating, one has to know its destination and how to get there. Electric vehicle is another hot topic where people try to find the optimal energy strategy for pure EV and hybrid EV. However, the routine for personal EV is rather fixed between home work, and shopping mall, etc. Hence it may not make any difference by applying optimal energy strategy upon personal EV. What we should be looking for is a kind of vehicle pattern that needs to constantly travel from one place to another, but the origins and destinations may not the same. Luckily, taxi services give us what we need. The general purpose of this project is to find out the effects on travel cost introduced by autonomous and electric vehicles. Specifically, I analyzed the travel pattern for 536 taxis in San Francisco, and how to optimize their routine when they are not occupied. The goal is to see how much effects it will bring in terms of energy saving.