Fleet-as-a-Service Architectures for Sustainable First- and Last-Mile Mobility: Integrating Shared Vehicle Operations, Real-Time Computing Paradigms, and Ethical Transportation Systems

Abstract

The global transportation ecosystem is undergoing a profound structural transformation driven by the convergence of sustainability imperatives, rapid urbanization, digital infrastructure maturation, and evolving mobility consumption patterns. Within this context, Fleet-as-a-Service (FaaS) has emerged as a unifying operational and conceptual paradigm that reconceptualizes vehicle ownership, deployment, testing, and lifecycle management as service-oriented processes rather than asset-bound activities. This research article develops an extensive theoretical and analytical examination of FaaS architectures as they apply to sustainable vehicle testing, shared mobility operations, and first- and last-mile transportation systems. Drawing upon interdisciplinary scholarship from transportation engineering, computer systems, real-time scheduling, cloud and serverless computing, and intelligent transportation systems, the article situates FaaS as a socio-technical infrastructure rather than a narrowly defined logistics solution. Particular emphasis is placed on how FaaS reshapes the testing and validation of emerging vehicle technologies, including automated, connected, and shared vehicles, while simultaneously enabling scalable operational models aligned with sustainability objectives (Deshpande, 2024).

The study synthesizes prior work on shared mobility optimization, demand-responsive transit, feeder services, and micro-simulation modeling to demonstrate how FaaS platforms enable dynamic fleet orchestration across heterogeneous urban environments (Goswami et al., 2021; Huang et al., 2021). Beyond transportation theory, the article critically integrates insights from real-time systems scheduling, serverless computing, and edge-cloud architectures to argue that modern FaaS deployments are computationally intensive systems whose performance, reliability, and ethical accountability depend on sophisticated task partitioning, latency guarantees, and workload management strategies (Baruah, 2013; Nguyen et al., 2019). Through an expansive qualitative methodology grounded in comparative literature analysis and conceptual modeling, the article identifies persistent gaps in existing research, particularly concerning the ethical governance, computational sustainability, and cross-domain integration of FaaS systems.

The results of this analysis indicate that FaaS is not merely an operational efficiency mechanism but a foundational infrastructure capable of aligning mobility innovation with environmental stewardship, equitable access, and technological accountability. The discussion extends these findings by engaging competing scholarly perspectives, addressing limitations of current models, and outlining future research trajectories that bridge transportation planning with computing systems design. By offering a deeply elaborated, citation-rich, and theoretically grounded contribution, this article advances the academic discourse on sustainable mobility systems and positions FaaS as a critical lever for the next generation of intelligent transportation ecosystems (Deshpande, 2024; Grahn et al., 2021).