An Online Mechanism for Ridesharing in Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems
This addresses the challenge of passenger cooperation in urban transport systems to reduce congestion and emissions, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing mechanism design for ridesharing.
The paper tackles the problem of incentivizing truthful demand reporting in ridesharing for Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand systems by introducing an online mechanism called IORS, which achieves competitive performance compared to benchmarks like optimal assignment and an offline auction-based mechanism.
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.