Why This Matters

Autonomous vehicle deployment in on-demand transit faces fundamental reliability challenges: traditional routing algorithms designed for human drivers prioritize travel time but ignore the consistency and predictability requirements essential for AVs operating in complex urban environments. AVATAR is innovative because it explicitly incorporates AV operational constraints—including construction zones, pedestrian density, and variable traffic conditions—into the routing framework, enabling more reliable and sustainable AV-based transportation systems.

What We Did

AVATAR is an autonomy-aware routing framework for on-demand transit that prioritizes dependable, low-variance routes by considering factors like road speed, speed variability, construction zones, pedestrian encounters, and school zones. The approach uses multi-criteria decision-making to evaluate routes based on multiple operational objectives including speed, consistency, safety, and user preferences. The framework supports both real-time AV operations and offline analysis, enabling transit operators to assess and refine routing strategies based on user-configurable preferences and real-world constraints.

Key Results

Real-world validation using data from Nashville, Silicon Valley, and Yokohama demonstrates that AVATAR generates significantly more reliable routes than traditional approaches. Autonomy-aware routing substantially improves route consistency and predictability compared to speed-optimized baselines while maintaining competitive travel times.

Full Abstract

Cite This Paper

@inproceedings{rogers2025,
  author = {Rogers, David and Gupta, Samir and Talusan, Jose Paolo and Baig, Mirza and Ramesh, Arti and Takahashi, Natsu and Kojo, Naoki and Dubey, Abhishek},
  booktitle = {2025 IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP)},
  title = {AVATAR: Autonomy Aware Routing for On-demand Transit Applications},
  year = {2025},
  month = {jun},
  abstract = {Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are becoming integral to on-demand micro transit, offering the potential for safer, efficient, and sustainable transportation. However, AV deploy- ment faces several challenges, including the lack of suitable roadways, varying travel conditions. Traditional routers prioritize speed and not reliability, leading to unpredictable operations and complications in planning. To address these, we introduce AVATAR, an autonomy-aware routing framework that prioritizes dependable, low-variance routes. Our approach encodes mul- tiple objectives including road speed, speed variability, zoning areas, pedestrian encounters, and operator preferred roadways into edge-level routing engines. Objective optimized routes are generated, then scored using a multi-criteria decision-making process. User-configurable preference profiles, allow operators to define a balance between reliability and speed. AVATAR is a data- driven framework that supports both real-time AV operations and offline analysis, enabling transit operators to assess and refine routing strategies. Our experiments using real-world data from Silicon Valley, California, and Yokohama, Japan show that our approach significantly improves AV reliability and performance and advances the sustainable and scalable integration of AVs into future transportation networks.},
  contribution = {lead},
  keywords = {autonomous vehicles, path planning, multi-criteria routing, on-demand transit, reliability optimization, traffic management},
  month_numeric = {6}
}
Quick Info
Year 2025
Keywords
autonomous vehicles path planning multi-criteria routing on-demand transit reliability optimization traffic management
Research Areas
transit planning CPS
Search Tags

AVATAR, Autonomy, Aware, Routing, demand, Transit, Applications, autonomous vehicles, path planning, multi-criteria routing, on-demand transit, reliability optimization, traffic management, transit, planning, CPS, 2025, Rogers, Gupta, Talusan, Baig, Ramesh, Takahashi, Kojo, Dubey