An Online Mechanism for Ridesharing in Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces an online ridesharing mechanism for autonomous mobility systems that incentivizes truthful demand reporting, aiming to reduce traffic and emissions while maintaining economic efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel posted-price, integrated online mechanism (IORS) that ensures incentive compatibility, individual rationality, and budget balance in autonomous ridesharing.

Findings

IORS performs competitively against optimal and auction-based benchmarks.

The mechanism effectively promotes truthful demand reporting.

Numerical results validate the mechanism's efficiency and practicality.

Abstract

With proper management, Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand (AMoD) systems have great potential to satisfy the transport demands of urban populations by providing safe, convenient, and affordable ridesharing services. Meanwhile, such systems can substantially decrease private car ownership and use, and thus significantly reduce traffic congestion, energy consumption, and carbon emissions. To achieve this objective, an AMoD system requires private information about the demand from passengers. However, due to self-interestedness, passengers are unlikely to cooperate with the service providers in this regard. Therefore, an online mechanism is desirable if it incentivizes passengers to truthfully report their actual demand. For the purpose of promoting ridesharing, we hereby introduce a posted-price, integrated online ridesharing mechanism (IORS) that satisfies desirable properties such as ex-post incentive compatibility, individual rationality, and budget-balance. Numerical results indicate the competitiveness of IORS compared with two benchmarks, namely the optimal assignment and an offline, auction-based mechanism.