The Price of Anarchy for Transportation Networks with Mixed Autonomy

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how mixed autonomy in transportation networks affects the efficiency of selfish routing, revealing conditions under which the price of anarchy remains bounded despite the potential for unbounded inefficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a model for mixed autonomous and regular vehicles, establishes bounds on the price of anarchy based on network asymmetry, and demonstrates tightness of these bounds.

Findings

Price of anarchy can be arbitrarily large in mixed autonomy networks.

Bounded asymmetry (less than 4) ensures a bounded price of anarchy.

Bounds on the bicriteria depend on the degree of asymmetry and align with classical results.

Abstract

We study routing behavior in transportation networks with mixed autonomy, that is, networks in which a fraction of the vehicles on each road are equipped with autonomous capabilities such as adaptive cruise control that enable reduced headways and increased road capacity. Motivated by capacity models developed for such roads with mixed autonomy, we consider transportation networks in which the delay on each road or link is an affine function of two quantities: the number of vehicles with autonomous capabilities on the link and the number of regular vehicles on the link. We particularly study the price of anarchy for such networks, that is, the ratio of the total delay experienced by selfish routing to the socially optimal routing policy. Unlike the case when all vehicles are of the same type, for which the price of anarchy is known to be bounded, we first show that the price of anarchy can be arbitrarily large for such mixed autonomous networks. Next, we define a notion of asymmetry equal to the maximum possible travel time improvement due to the presence of autonomous vehicles. We show that when the degree of asymmetry of all links in the network is bounded by a factor less than 4, the price of anarchy is bounded. We also bound the bicriteria, which is a bound on the cost of selfishly routing traffic compared to the cost of optimally routing additional traffic. These bounds depend on the degree of asymmetry and recover classical bounds on the price of anarchy and bicriteria in the case when no asymmetry exists. Further, we show with examples that these bound are tight in particular cases.