On the Integration of Shared Autonomous Mobility on Demand in Mobility Service Platforms

Recently, travelers increasingly book trips that combine public transportation with emerging mobility modes such as ride-sharing. Mobility service platforms aim to integrate this heterogeneous mobility mix on a single software platform. In practice, only first appearances of collaborations between public transit companies and ride-sharing companies have emerged so far. Especially with the coming emergence of autonomous vehicles, ride-sharing services will become a vital mobility mode as part of Mobility-as-a-Service schemes. Therefore, this study aims to research the requirements for integrating ride-sharing services into a mobility service platform from a user-centered and technical perspective. For this, we first analyzed the overall attitude towards autonomous ride-sharing in a citizen workshop and evaluated a prototype of the system in a small user study. Additionally, we conceptually integrated the service into an existing reference platform for mobility services and investigated the technical and operational differences between public transportation and ride-sharing services. The analysis shows that autonomous ride-sharing services are integrable into a mobility service platform but have distinct requirements that other mobility services such as scooter-sharing or public transit do not have.