A Real-Time Repositioning Strategy for SAEV Fleets Using a Simulation-Informed Deep Learning Model

Shared Autonomous Electric Vehicles (SAEVs) can enhance urban mobility and efficiency. However, their operational performance is often hindered by the spatio-temporal imbalance between vehicle supply and passenger demand, leading to long wait times. This paper develops a novel repositioning framework where a lightweight CNN, informed by computationally intensive multi-agent simulations, enables real-time strategy deployment. The results show that: (1) An optimized repositioning policy, calibrated via multi-agent simulation, effectively cuts the mean passenger waiting time from 12.0 to 3.0 minutes (a 75% reduction). (2) A lightweight CNN surrogate model enables real-time deployment, reducing the policy computation time from ~4 hours to ~5 minutes (>98% faster). (3) The deep learning surrogate achieves this speed with a negligible performance trade-off, increasing the waiting time by only 0.156 minutes (4.9%) compared to the full optimization.