A Coordination Mechanism for the Freight Routing Problem with Discrete Time Intervals

Transportation networks suffer from traffic congestion problems due to the continuously increasing number of vehicles. The main consequences of this problem are longer travel times, higher pollution levels, more fuel consumption, which point to many other hidden costs such as health, driving stress etc. One of the main causes of this problem is the relatively high volume of trucks especially in ports and commercial areas and the fact that their drivers are currently making routing decisions in an independent manner based on their individual information and understanding of traffic conditions. In this paper, we propose a coordination mechanism for truck routing decisions which reduces the overall congestion cost in the traffic network, contributing to the improvement of traffic conditions for both passenger vehicles and truck drivers. Main objectives of our mechanism design is the minimization of the total system cost while ensuring that the truck drivers will not be harmed compared to the user equilibrium. Moreover, by defining our model in a way that allows the truckers to declare their preferred travel time, we derive sufficient conditions for the existence of payment schemes which ensure individual ex-post voluntary participation of the truck drivers while leading in a truthful and weakly budget balanced on average mechanism. The simulation of our approach using the Sioux Falls network demonstrates that the proposed mechanism has a better performance in terms of efficiency than the user equilibrium approach.