Mobility Equity and Economic Sustainability Using Game Theory

TL;DR

This paper introduces a game-theoretic framework for multi-modal mobility systems that balances equity and sustainability by maximizing worst-case revenue while ensuring accessibility and truthful participation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel linear programming approach to optimize revenue and equity in multi-modal transportation, accounting for individual budgets and capacity constraints.

Findings

Maximized worst-case revenue under mobility equity constraints.

Ensured truthful participation and voluntary engagement of travelers.

Characterized the optimal solution for the assignment problem.

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a multi-modal mobility system of travelers each with an individual travel budget, and propose a game-theoretic framework to assign each traveler to a ``mobility service" (each one representing a different mode of transportation). We are interested in equity and sustainability, thus we maximize the worst-case revenue of the mobility system while ensuring ``mobility equity," which we define it in terms of accessibility. In the proposed framework, we ensure that all travelers are truthful and voluntarily participate under informational asymmetry, and the solution respects the individual budget of each traveler. Each traveler may seek to travel using multiple services (e.g., car, bus, train, bike). The services are capacitated and can serve up to a fixed number of travelers at any instant of time. Thus, our problem falls under the category of many-to-one assignment problems, where the goal is to find the conditions that guarantee the stability of assignments. We formulate a linear program of maximizing worst-case revenue under the constraints of mobility equity, and we fully characterize the optimal solution.