Construction of One-Way Car-Sharing System Considering Coalition Rationality Based on Mechanism Design

Abstract

This article proposes a control algorithm for one-waycar sharing. The problem with one-way car sharing is that the origin and the destination parking lots tend to be biased because of user traffic demands, and the cost of relocating the vehicle to increase the operating rate is high. To solve this problem, we propose providing incentives to users in the form of discounts and changing the parking lots and departure times to prevent bias in the number of vehicles in the parking lots. In this study, the optimum parking lot was determined using a queue to incorporate the user traffic demand distribution. Furthermore, based on the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves mechanism design, an incentive design was created to satisfy desirable properties, such as strategy-proofness, individual rationality, and coalition rationality. In the proposed one-way car-sharing system, the system manager decides the proposal based on the information reported by the users. Therefore, satisfying these properties not only guarantees that the users will benefit from agreeing to the proposal, but also that even in case of a false declaration or shill bidding, the discount will not be unreasonably profitable. Finally, the increase in demand acceptance by applying the proposed method is confirmed by numerical simulation.