Three-Player Cooperative Game With Side-Payments for Discretionary Lane Changes of Connected Vehicles

The rapid development of new technologies, e.g., connected vehicles and e-wallet, offers us opportunities to rethink cooperative lane-change (LC) models. Most of existing cooperative LC models require a selfless assumption by default, which is usually too stringent for travelers. A cooperative LC game framework with appropriate side-payments can make up for this deficiency. In such games, when travelers maximize their own benefits, they will naturally cooperate to improve the system performance. This paper designs a four-step transferable utility based three-player game framework, which can cover all LC scenarios on multi-lane roads combing with the two-player model in the previous work. Our four-step framework is also suitable for other cooperative games with side-payments. Furthermore, the simulation results show that, cooperative games with side-payments can reduce vehicles’ LC frequency and meanwhile benefit all transaction vehicles in most scenarios in expectation. Moreover, the urgent vehicles with very high values of time can save up to 42% travel time on congested roads under the simulation settings.