Auction Based Parking Lot Assignment and Empty Cruising Limitation of Privately Owned Autonomous Vehicles in a Simple City Model

We describe an experiment of optimizing parking of privately owned connected autonomous vehicles (CAV) involving a municipal limitation of the empty cruising distances.Assuming that a considerable fraction of connected autonomous vehicles will be in private ownership, the problem of parking emerges, calling for a novel and regulated solution. To this end, we propose an auction-based parking lot assignment that optimizes the parking costs and penalizes the empty cruising.To grasp a hypothetical situation, we assess the properties of the proposed mechanism by simulations. A highly abstracted circular city model is presented as a simulation environment to the parking problem, which also considers the regulations limiting the extent of empty cruising. This hypothetical model includes two kinds of parking facilities (curb-sided parking lots and parking houses), various human activity models, pricing, and distance calculations calibrated by values measured in contemporary Budapest.Simulations indicate that using an auction mechanism does not necessarily increase parking charges significantly. The results also call attention to proper empty cruising regulations as parking lot occupancy and vehicle kilometer traveled strongly depend on them.