Design and Stability Analysis of a Shared Mobility Market

TL;DR

This paper proposes a linear programming framework for designing a stable and socially optimal shared mobility market, ensuring fair profit allocation between travelers and vehicle operators.

Contribution

It introduces a novel linear programming model for optimal traveler-vehicle assignment and establishes conditions for stable profit sharing in shared mobility systems.

Findings

Optimal assignment maximizes social welfare.

Stable profit allocation conditions are derived.

Framework ensures feasible and fair mobility market design.

Abstract

In recent years, we have witnessed a remarkable surge of usage in shared vehicles in our cities. Shared mobility offers a future of no congestion in busy city roads with increasing populations of travelers, passengers, and drivers. Given the behavioral decision-making of travelers and the shared vehicles' operators, however, the question is "how can we ensure a socially-acceptable assignment between travelers and vehicles?" In other words, how can we design a shared mobility system that assigns each traveler to the "right" vehicle? In this paper, we design a shared mobility market consisted of travelers and vehicles in a transportation network. We formulate a linear programming problem and derive the optimal assignment between travelers and vehicles. In addition, we provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for the stable traveler-vehicle profit allocation. Our goal is twofold: maximize the social welfare of all travelers with the optimal assignment while ensuring the feasibility and stability of the traveler-vehicle profit allocation while respecting the decision-making of both the travelers and the vehicles' operators.