Traffic planning method for a vehicle fleet

A computer-implemented traffic planning method for controlling a plurality of vehicles which are movable among multiple shared resources in accordance with predefined motion commands, each resource representing space for transport or parking, a communication channel, maintenance machinery or additional equipment for optional temporary use, wherein a vehicle is allowed to move from a first resource to a second resource if the first resource is connected to the second resource and the second resource is not occupied,

• the method comprising the following steps to be performed by processing circuitry of a computer system:
• receiving a transport mission to be carried out by the vehicles;
• generating a root node representing an initial resource occupancy of the vehicles;
• generating a search tree from the root node, in which each edge represents a motion command and each node represents a resource occupancy, wherein each node is associated with a score related to the vehicles' fulfilment of the transport mission, and a score is assigned to a newly generated node in the search tree by computing a value of the short-term component and reading a value of the long-term component from a memory;
• identifying, among the nodes of the search tree, a target node with an acceptable score;
• and
• deriving a planned sequence of motion commands corresponding to a path from the root node to the target node,
• wherein the score of a node includes a short-term component, which represents a cost of executing all motion commands from the root node to said node, and a long-term component, which is determined by the resource occupancy that the node represents;
• and
• performing an initial scoring phase in which the memory is populated with values of the long-term component by evaluating movements of the vehicles with respect to expected battery energy levels of the vehicles.