  In future transportation systems, the charging behavior of electric
Autonomous Mobility on Demand (AMoD) fleets, i.e., fleets of electric
self-driving cars that service on-demand trip requests, will likely challenge
power distribution networks (PDNs), causing overloads or voltage drops. In this
paper, we show that these challenges can be significantly attenuated if the
PDNs' operational constraints and exogenous loads (e.g., from homes or
businesses) are accounted for when operating an electric AMoD fleet. We focus
on a system-level perspective, assuming full coordination between the AMoD and
the PDN operators. From this single entity perspective, we assess potential
coordination benefits. Specifically, we extend previous results on an
optimization-based modeling approach for electric AMoD systems to jointly
control an electric AMoD fleet and a series of PDNs, and analyze the benefit of
coordination under load balancing constraints. For a case study of Orange
County, CA, we show that the coordination between the electric AMoD fleet and
the PDNs eliminates 99% of the overloads and 50% of the voltage drops that the
electric AMoD fleet would cause in an uncoordinated setting. Our results show
that coordinating electric AMoD and PDNs can help maintain the reliability of
PDNs under added electric AMoD charging load, thus significantly mitigating or
deferring the need for PDN capacity upgrades.
