Truthful double auction for intra-city freight transportation with carpooling mode

Carpooling is an effective way to achieve lower transportation cost, higher vehicle utilization and alleviate air pollution and traffic congestion by allowing the joint coverage of overlapped distance. It has been extensively studied for passenger transportation while attracts little academic attention for freight transportation. In this paper we investigate intra-city freight transportation service transaction problem (IFTSP) with carpooling mode and propose truthful carpooling double auction (TCDA) mechanism for solving it. We prove theoretically that TCDA mechanism is incentive compatible (IC), budget balanced (BB), individual rational (IR) and asymptotically efficient (AsE). Numerical experiments show that TCDA can significantly improve the social welfare and vehicle utilization compared with conventional McAfee mechanism. It can also greatly enhance customers' utility and balance the market power in sellers' market.