Designing Non-monetary Intersection Control Mechanisms for Efficient Selfish Routing

2025-11-03

AI Summary

Urban traffic congestion arises from the efficiency gap between self-interested route choices and system-optimal flow, while conventional intersection control often neglects driver strategic behavior, exacerbating inefficiency. This paper proposes a vehicle-infrastructure cooperative, non-monetary timestamp-based scheduling mechanism: a hierarchical architecture integrating “local roadside scheduling” with “global centralized optimization,” rigorously establishing existence and near-uniqueness of equilibrium flow via analytical modeling and bilevel optimization. Its key innovation lies in replacing price-based incentives with communication-enabled fine-grained timestamp regulation—guiding individual decisions toward social optimality without altering users’ payment behavior. Evaluated on the Sioux Falls network, the approach reduces the efficiency gap between equilibrium and optimal flow by up to 68%. The framework combines theoretical rigor, scalability, and practical deployability.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Search and Optimization: Learning to Search

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

Abstract

Urban traffic congestion stems from the misalignment between self-interested routing decisions and socially optimal flows. Intersections, as critical bottlenecks, amplify these inefficiencies because existing control schemes often neglect drivers' strategic behavior. Autonomous intersections, enabled by vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, permit vehicle-level scheduling based on individual requests. Leveraging this fine-grained control, we propose a non-monetary mechanism that strategically adjusts request timestamps-delaying or advancing passage times-to incentivize socially efficient routing. We present a hierarchical architecture separating local scheduling by roadside units from network-wide timestamp adjustments by a central planner. We establish an experimentally validated analytical model, prove the existence and essential uniqueness of equilibrium flows and formulate the planner's problem as an offline bilevel optimization program solvable with standard tools. Experiments on the Sioux Falls network show up to a 68% reduction in the efficiency gap between equilibrium and optimal flows, demonstrating scalability and effectiveness.

Problem

• Addresses traffic congestion from selfish routing versus optimal flows
• Proposes non-monetary intersection control using timestamp adjustments
• Reduces efficiency gap between equilibrium and optimal routing

Innovation

• Adjusts request timestamps to incentivize efficient routing
• Uses hierarchical architecture separating local and central control
• Solves bilevel optimization for equilibrium flow improvement