REALISM: A Regulatory Framework for Coordinated Scheduling in Multi-Operator Shared Micromobility Services

TL;DR

This paper introduces REALISM, a regulatory framework for coordinated scheduling among multiple shared micromobility operators, aiming to improve fairness and efficiency in urban vehicle deployment.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel regulatory framework that incorporates city goals and operator contributions using Shapley value, with an optimization process ensuring fairness and improved system performance.

Findings

Achieves at least 39.93% improvement in vehicle usage equity

Improves demand satisfaction by 1.82% on average

Validated with real-world Chicago e-scooter data

Abstract

Shared micromobility (e.g., shared bikes and electric scooters), as a kind of emerging urban transportation, has become more and more popular in the world. However, the blooming of shared micromobility vehicles brings some social problems to the city (e.g., overloaded vehicles on roads, and the inequity of vehicle deployment), which deviate from the city regulator's expectation of the service of the shared micromobility system. In addition, the multi-operator shared micromobility system in a city complicates the problem because of their non-cooperative self-interested pursuits. Existing regulatory frameworks of multi-operator vehicle rebalancing generally assume the intrusive control of vehicle rebalancing of all the operators, which is not practical in the real world. To address this limitation, we design REALISM, a regulatory framework for coordinated scheduling in multi-operator shared micromobility services that incorporates the city regulator's regulations in the form of assigning a score to each operator according to the city goal achievements and operators' individual contributions to achieving the city goal, measured by Shapley value. To realize the fairness-aware score assignment, we measure the fairness of assigned scores and use them as one of the components to optimize the score assignment model. To optimize the whole framework, we develop an alternating procedure to make operators and the city regulator interact with each other until convergence. We evaluate our framework based on real-world e-scooter usage data in Chicago. Our experiment results show that our method achieves a performance gain of at least 39.93% in the equity of vehicle usage and 1.82% in the average demand satisfaction of the whole city.