Investigating cooperation strategies for local traffic authorities and in-vehicle route guidance service providers
Creators: name: Luan, Jianlin
Publisher: name: Imperial College London
Year: 2016

description: There has been a recent trend of cooperation between local traffic authorities and in-vehicle route guidance service providers that involves free exchange of traffic data. It is important for both sides to understand the outcomes of the cooperation and how to improve their individual outcomes. Despite the relevance of this topic, this area has not been explored in detail by existing studies. Hence, this thesis focuses on investigating cooperation strategies for both local authorities and service providers. This research first develops a cooperation strategy evaluation framework for free data exchange schemes. The framework consists of two model components. The first component is a mixed Path Size Logit (PSL) based market equilibrium model that estimates the market response to a given cooperation strategy. The second component comprises functions to evaluate the benefit for local traffic authorities and service providers. In particular, the benefit functions for free service providers and paid service providers are developed based on assumptions about their differences in revenue sources. Next, a framework for optimising cooperation strategies for the local authority and service providers is developed based on a non-cooperative Nash game. The framework is formulated as an Equilibrium Problem with Equilibrium Constraints (EPEC), which is solved by a Particle Swarm Optimiser (PSO) based Diagonalization algorithm that is developed as a part of this research. This optimisation framework is subsequently extended to analyse cooperation scenarios involving paid data sharing schemes and a mix of free and paid schemes. A number of numerical studies are conducted using the developed frameworks. One numerical study investigates the impact of market characteristics on the market share of a service provider with relatively good data quality, and finds that the route choice set composition, drivers’ value of time (VOT) and their perception accuracy with respect to service providers’ utility have a significant impact on the market share. The other numerical studies show three general implications for the cooperation. Firstly, when a local traffic authority’s objective is to maximise the network performance, it should cooperate with all service providers via free data exchange schemes and make sure that cooperative service providers use the data to enhance their data quality and not just reduce their own data acquisition costs. Secondly, when a local traffic authority considers generating a revenue by selling its data to cooperative service providers (via paid schemes), the authority should be aware that its revenue does not always increase when the data is sold to more service providers; higher revenues can sometimes be obtained from service providers who get a data quality advantage over other providers from local authority data. Finally, there may be a public concern about whether the local traffic authority’s data is appropriately utilised for improving the public benefit when the local traffic authority cooperates with service providers via paid schemes, and such concerns may prevent the local traffic authority from engaging in commercial transactions with service providers through paid data exchange schemes.