Resting Your Car for Cash: Incentive Mechanism Based TNC Car Scheduling for Carbon Neutrality

The transportation network company (TNC) services (i.e., Uber, Lyft, Didi, etc.) can effectively match the vehicles/drivers with passengers via mobile applications, and solve the first- and last-mile problem. However, most idle TNC vehicles have to travel around looking for the next order, which causes unnecessary carbon emissions. In addition, the idle TNC vehicles tend to move to the higher-trip-revenue regions, which leads to traffic congestion in those regions and insufficient supply of TNC vehicles in low-trip-revenue regions. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a contract-based incentive mechanism by considering the information asymmetry between the TNC service center and the TNC vehicles. With the proposed incentive mechanism, the TNC service center can (a) give idle TNC drivers certain incentives/rewards to park their vehicles while waiting for the next order, which reduces the carbon emissions caused by unnecessary cruising; (b) provide the optimal rewards to the parked TNC vehicles according to their hidden preferences for moving to other high-trip-revenue regions; and (c) offer appropriate rewards to the parked TNC vehicles in low-vehicle-supply regions, which ensures the sufficient TNC vehicle supply in these regions. Using the released public data of Didi Chuxing, we conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed incentive mechanism. The results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can significantly reduce carbon emissions while the TNC vehicle supplies of all regions are ensured.

I. Introduction

With the development of mobile applications, an increasing number of Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) have emerged, such as Uber, Lyft, Didi, etc [1]. These TNCs offer real-time services to effectively pair the vehicles/drivers with the passengers [2]. The TNC services perfectly solve the first- and last-mile problem of people's daily commute and act as a good complement to traditional taxi systems. Moreover, since the TNC services reduce the reliance on private cars, they can reduce traffic congestion in urban areas. In general, the TNC services make our daily commute more convenient and have become an indispensable part of our lives.