Equilibrium Analysis in the Parking Search Game with Heuristic Strategies

The tremendous growth of urbanization calls for several interventions for the efficient and environmentally sustainable management of various urban processes, including the road traffic management. Indeed, transportation engineers need to be able to understand how drivers decide their route to effectively address the plethora of challenges for alleviating the congestion phenomena in city areas. In this paper, we model drivers' decision-making with respect to the parking space search, which has been regarded as one of the major causes of traffic congestion. We view the parking search as an instance of sequential search problems and present a game-theoretic investigation of the efficiency of heuristic parking search strategies to locate available parking spot at minimum walking and driving overhead. The analytical study concludes by drawing similarities between the parking game and well-known archetypal games that the Game Theory examines.