A Review of Researches on Operation Management, Simulation, and Evaluation of Urban Autonomous Delivery Vehicles

The operation simulation and evaluation constitute the basis of theoretical research in the field of autonomous delivery vehicles, and are conducive to the high-quality ground operation of autonomous delivery vehicles. This paper first reviews the current state of autonomous delivery vehicle technology and the domestic and international safety operation management standards, then analyzes the driving characteristics of autonomous delivery vehicles (including vehicle safety attributes, speed and energy consumption profiles, as well as following and lane-changing behaviors) and the operational characteristics of delivery services. The study highlights the need to strike an appropriate balance among vehicle design, environmental factors and delivery tasks, and summarizes the current state and limitations of simulation methodologies for testing autonomous delivery vehicle technology, operational impact assessments, and network simulations. On this basis, by drawing on the operation evaluation methodologies for autonomous delivery vehicles at home and abroad and considering the operational characteristics, an indicator system for assessing the performance of autonomous delivery vehicles operating in non-motorized lanes is established, and the key evaluation metrics and future research directions of autonomous delivery vehicles are outlined. There comes to the conclusions that (1) the existing simulation technologies for the operation of autonomous delivery vehicles lack unified and authoritative management standards; (2) the researches on simulation-based evaluation of the operational impacts of autonomous delivery vehicles are limited; (3) current studies on the operational characteristics of autonomous delivery vehicles are insufficiently detailed and lack consideration of real-world deployment scenarios; and (4) drawing on road level-of-service evaluation indicators, average speed variation rate and average density variation rate are two appropriate evaluation metrics for assessing the impact of autonomous delivery vehicle deployment.