Speaker: Dr. Marco Nie, Northwestern University, USA

Time: 10:00-11:00 July 9th, 2019

Venue: Tongji Building Block A Room 206

Abstract:

We propose a novel quantity-based travel demand management system aiming to promote ride-share.  The system sells the permit to access a road facility (simplified as a bottleneck) by auction but encourages travelers to share the permits with each other through ride-share.  The permit is classified according to access time and the travelers may be assigned one of the three roles: solo driver, ride-share driver, or rider.  At the core of this auction-based permit allocation and sharing system (A-PASS) is a trilateral matching problem (TMP) that optimally matches the permits, drivers and riders with one another.   We formulate the TMP as an integer program, and proved it can be reduced to an equivalent linear program.   A pricing policy based on the classical VCG mechanism is proposed to determine the payment for each traveler. We also show the operator of A-PASS can eliminate any deficit that may arise from the application of the VCG mechanism, by controlling the number of shared rides. Results of numerical experiment suggest the trilateral matching scheme strongly promote rider-share.  As ride-share increases, all stakeholders are better off: the operator receives greater profits, the commuters enjoy higher utility, and the society benefits from more efficient utilization of infrastructure.

Speaker’s Bio:

Dr. Marco Nie is currently a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. He received his B.S. in Structural Engineering from Tsinghua University, his M.S. from National University of Singapore and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis. Dr. Nie’s research covers a variety of topics in the areas of transportation systems analysis, transportation economics, and sustainable transportation. Dr. Nie had served as a member of the TRB committees on Transportation Network Modeling and Traffic flow Theory and Characteristics.He is currently an Associate Editor for Transportation Science, an Area Editor for Networks and Spatial Economics, and a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for Transportmetrica-B and Transportation Research Part B. Dr. Nie’s research has been supported by National Science Foundation, Transportation Research Board, US Department of Transportation, US Department of Energy, and Illinois Department of Transportation.