Assessing the Financial Feasibility of Integrating Autonomous Vehicle in Hospital Access Service

抄録

With the increasing attention of population ageing, transportation services for the elderly has been one of the concerns in recent years. Among others, hospital access service (HAS) is a challenging issue in an ageing and/or aged society. Recent literature has been exploring the possibility of applying Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technologies for the HAS problem in view of their merits of manpower saving and technical advancement. The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential and financial feasibility of integrating AV into an HAS scheme. In the numerical analysis, this study developed an agent-based model to simulate the operational performance of the proposed AV-HAS scheme under a simplified grid network. The simulation results indicate that power efficiency of EVs can be negligible for an AV transportation system, but the initial cost has a great influence on the financial sustainability of an AV-based hospital access system.