A DESIGN OF A BUNDLING RESERVATION SYSTEM FOR URBAN TRANSPORT SERVICES UNDER DEMAND UNCERTAINTY

Abstract

 One way to control excess demands for urban transport services is to match demand with the service capacity in advance through quantity regulations, such as introducing reservation systems. However, this system does not work for non-reservation users, who cannot make reservations owing to irregular activities (such as sudden purchases, hospital visits and business trip behaviour), while it is socially undesirable to exclude this demand by fully introducing a reservation system. This study proposes a new reservation system that contributes to the efficiency of transport systems where reservation and non-reservation users share capacity-constrained transport services. We first describe a mathematical model of a transport system with the proposed reservation scheme referred to as a bundled commuter scheme. We next propose an auction mechanism for implementing the proposed scheme by extending the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism. We then show that the proposed scheme with this mechanism satisfies the strategy-proof and the efficiency properties. Moreover, this scheme ensures that users who participate in the proposed reservation scheme do not lose compared to when they do not participate. Finally, numerical experiments are conducted to investigate the properties of the proposed scheme in detail with comparing to other control schemes.