A Traveler Incentive Program for Promoting Community-Based Ridesharing
A Traveler Incentive Program for Promoting Community-Based Ridesharing
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DOI：
10.1287/trsc.2021.1121
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发表时间：
2022-01
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Amirmahdi Tafreshian;Neda Masoud
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文献类型：
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作者：
Amirmahdi Tafreshian;Neda Masoud
交通拥堵已成为地球仪的一个严重问题，部分原因是单人通勤。拼车可以为通勤出行提供一个合适的选择。然而，有几个重要的障碍阻碍了拼车系统成为一种可行的交通方式，包括缺乏回家的保障以及难以获得足够数量的参与者。本文通过引入旅行者激励计划（TIP）来解决这些障碍，以促进以社区为基础的乘车共享，并在通勤者中提供乘车回家的保证。TIP计划将激励措施分配给（1）直接补贴一组精选的拼车服务，以及（2）鼓励一小部分精心挑选的旅行者改变他们的旅行行为（即，出发或到达时间）。我们制定了基本的乘车匹配问题作为一个无约束的最小成本流问题，并提出了一个基于拉格朗日松弛算法与最坏情况下的最优约束，以解决大规模的情况下，这个问题在多项式时间。我们进一步提出了一个多项式时间，平衡的版本的问题。数值实验表明，分配补贴来改变出行行为比直接补贴乘车更有益。此外，使用低至1%的统一税率可以在激励计划的非均衡变量中使系统的社会福利翻倍。
Traffic congestion has become a serious issue around the globe, partly owing to single-occupancy commuter trips. Ridesharing can present a suitable alternative for serving commuter trips. However, there are several important obstacles that impede ridesharing systems from becoming a viable mode of transportation, including the lack of a guarantee for a ride back home as well as the difficulty of obtaining a critical mass of participants. This paper addresses these obstacles by introducing a traveler incentive program (TIP) to promote community-based ridesharing with a ride back home guarantee among commuters. The TIP program allocates incentives to (1) directly subsidize a select set of ridesharing rides and (2) encourage a small, carefully selected set of travelers to change their travel behavior (i.e., departure or arrival times). We formulate the underlying ride-matching problem as a budget-constrained min-cost flow problem and present a Lagrangian relaxation-based algorithm with a worst-case optimality bound to solve large-scale instances of this problem in polynomial time. We further propose a polynomial-time, budget-balanced version of the problem. Numerical experiments suggest that allocating subsidies to change travel behavior is significantly more beneficial than directly subsidizing rides. Furthermore, using a flat tax rate as low as 1% can double the system’s social welfare in the budget-balanced variant of the incentive program.