Efficient and stable ride-pooling through a multi-level coalition formation game

作者：Yaotian Tan, Shuyue Qian, Aoyong Li, Haiyang Yu, Jie Gao · 发表于：Communications in Transportation Research · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1016/j.commtr.2025.100220 · 被引用次数：8 · 研究领域：Transportation and Mobility Innovations、Transportation Planning and Optimization、Vehicle Routing Optimization Methods

Ride-pooling has the potential to offer a sustainable solution for urban mobility by reducing vehicle use and emissions through shared trips. However, its adoption remains limited due to poor matching performance. Many requests fail to form feasible pools, and even successful matches often involve long detours or minimal cost savings. These inefficiencies largely arise from fragmented market structures: most operators act independently, restricting matching to their own request pools and limiting the formation of beneficial coalitions. Aggregation platforms improve efficiency by integrating regional operators through unified dispatch systems, but raise concerns over long-term stability. Differences in operator cost structures and market shares may incentivize deviation, at the same time, passengers may reject assigned payments if more attractive alternatives exist. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-level coalition formation game that jointly models operator and passenger collaboration. At the upper level, operators play a non-cooperative game to decide coalition partners. At the lower level, passengers are grouped into shared trips through a cooperative game that ensures individually rational payments. The two layers are coupled via constraint propagation, forming a unified decision-making process. We evaluate our framework using real-world data from three Chinese regions—Chengdu, Haikou, and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region—chosen to reflect diverse urban and ...