Mechanisms for Cooperative Freight Routing: Incentivizing Individual Participation

摘要

The efficient use of the road network for freight transport has a big impact on travel times, pollution, and fuel consumption, as well as on the mobility of passenger vehicles. In today's road network, truck drivers make uncoordinated selfish routing decisions, which may easily congest an initially uncongested route as many truck drivers make the same selfish decision by choosing the same route in an effort to minimize their travel time without accounting for the fact that others do the same, given the same available traffic information. In this paper, we propose a coordinated system for truck drivers, using monetary incentives and fees, to balance the traffic load and improve the overall traffic conditions and time delays experienced by both truck and passenger vehicle drivers. The basic characteristics of the mechanisms presented are that they are budget balanced, do not penalize the truck drivers compared to the user equilibrium, and they assume voluntary participation. Two models of voluntary participation are considered: weak and strong voluntary participation. In the first, each one of the drivers prefers all the drivers (including self) to participate in the mechanism than not. In the second model, each one of the truck drivers prefers to participate in the system, provided that all the others do. For each model of voluntary participation, an incentive mechanism is designed. A special emphasis is given to the fairness of the proposed mechanisms. The numerical examples are used to demonstrate the results and the efficiency of the solution techniques.