Decisions in Mobility Service Networks -- Coordinating Demand and Supply Using a Mechanism Design Approach

Passenger transportation has become more diverse in the recent past. New providers and transportation services are reeling up markets around the world. Together with the rise of the sharing economy, substantial ramifications for the transportation sector emerge. As a result of an increasing number of mobility options, the traveler can choose from a richer mobility menu. The difficulty of selecting the most appropriate mobility alternative, however, grows in the number of mobility options. Hence, without appropriate decision support, the full potential of mobility alternatives may remain locked from utilization. We leverage structurally similar observations from the domains of IT service management and cloud computing to address this issue. In particular, we introduce a formal model for matching supply and demand on graphs via a market platform. This platform allows for efficient matching and orchestration of a set of individual means of transportation with demand featuring heterogeneous user preferences. Our specific contribution comprises the formalization of complex mobility services and the corresponding optimization problem as well as the development of an incentive-compatible auction mechanism, the complex mobility service auction. A stylized example demonstrates the efficacy of our approach.