Strategic Information Perturbation for an Online In-Vehicle Coordinated Routing Mechanism for Connected Vehicles Under Mixed-Strategy Congestion Game

The increased market penetration of route guidance tools–relaying real-time traffic information to drivers–can have damaging effects on transportation networks, including traffic congestion oscillation resulting from the overreaction phenomenon and the inability to control system performance. To address these issues, this study leverages V2I communication capabilities to integrate strategic real-time traffic information perturbation into an online, in-vehicle coordinated routing mechanism for connected vehicles using a mixed-strategy congestion game (CRM-M-IP). Under the CRM-M-IP, the routing decisions of all vehicles are coordinated to prevent overreaction. Additionally, the routing decisions for all vehicles are based on strategically perturbed traffic information (a convex combination between average and marginal link travel times), to ensure that the selfish route choices made by users also help improve system performance. We prove that low information perturbation levels can lead to high system performance gains with correspondingly low individual user optimality losses. From numerical experiments conducted on the Sioux Falls network, we observe that the CRM-M-IP leads to a system performance improvement greater than 3%, and average individual travel time reduction up to 3.5% as compared to the case with no perturbation. Moreover, we find that the average individual user optimality loss resulting from information perturbation is less than 2%. However, we find that when perturbation is high, some users can experience losses approaching 30%—illustrating the need to not over-perturb to ensure compliance of drivers.