REALISM: A Regulatory Framework for Coordinated Scheduling in Multi-Operator Shared Micromobility Services

2025-08-13

AI Summary

To address road vehicle overload and uneven fleet deployment arising from non-cooperative game dynamics among multiple operators in shared micromobility systems, this paper proposes a non-intrusive regulatory framework. Unlike conventional mandatory rebalancing mechanisms, our approach leverages the Shapley value to quantify each operator’s marginal contribution to city-wide objectives—such as equity and demand fulfillment—and designs a fairness-aware dynamic scoring and incentive scheme. Coordination is achieved via alternating optimization between the regulator and operators. Experiments on real-world electric scooter data from Chicago demonstrate that vehicle usage fairness improves by ≥39.93%, and city-wide average demand fulfillment increases by 1.82%. This work is the first to incorporate the Shapley value into incentive design for micromobility regulation, establishing a scalable, low-intervention theoretical and practical paradigm for multi-stakeholder governance.

Technology Category

• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Scheduling under Uncertainty
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Shared micromobility (e.g., shared bikes and electric scooters), as a kind of emerging urban transportation, has become more and more popular in the world. However, the blooming of shared micromobility vehicles brings some social problems to the city (e.g., overloaded vehicles on roads, and the inequity of vehicle deployment), which deviate from the city regulator's expectation of the service of the shared micromobility system. In addition, the multi-operator shared micromobility system in a city complicates the problem because of their non-cooperative self-interested pursuits. Existing regulatory frameworks of multi-operator vehicle rebalancing generally assume the intrusive control of vehicle rebalancing of all the operators, which is not practical in the real world. To address this limitation, we design REALISM, a regulatory framework for coordinated scheduling in multi-operator shared micromobility services that incorporates the city regulator's regulations in the form of assigning a score to each operator according to the city goal achievements and operators' individual contributions to achieving the city goal, measured by Shapley value. To realize the fairness-aware score assignment, we measure the fairness of assigned scores and use them as one of the components to optimize the score assignment model. To optimize the whole framework, we develop an alternating procedure to make operators and the city regulator interact with each other until convergence. We evaluate our framework based on real-world e-scooter usage data in Chicago. Our experiment results show that our method achieves a performance gain of at least 39.93% in the equity of vehicle usage and 1.82% in the average demand satisfaction of the whole city.

Problem

• Addresses inequity in multi-operator shared micromobility vehicle deployment
• Proposes a fair score-based regulatory framework for city goals
• Optimizes coordination between non-cooperative operators and city regulators

Innovation

• Regulatory framework for multi-operator micromobility coordination
• Fairness-aware score assignment using Shapley value
• Alternating optimization for operator-regulator interaction