On the Impact of Travelers’ Awareness on the Positive Externality Imposed by Automated Vehicles

In this paper, the commonly adopted assumption that network users are fully aware of the positive externality brought by the automated vehicles (AV) is relaxed. It is assumed that human-driven vehicle (HV) users are partially aware of the AVs’ positive externality and characterize HVs’ route choice behavior as the imperfect user equilibrium (IPUE), while AVs are assumed to follow the classic user equilibrium (UE) principle. The mixed IPUE-UE equilibrium problem is formulated as a variational inequality problem, and a diagonalization method is proposed to solve it. An example network is presented to verify the proposed framework and provide valuable insights. Numerical results revealed that the system efficiency might be compromised when there are not many AVs on the road and travelers are uncertain about the positive externality brought by AVs. Additionally, such a negative effect can be exacerbated under more congested cases.