An efficient parking-sharing program through owner cooperation with robust slot assignment and incentive revenue distribution

Abstract

This article introduces an intra-owner-cooperation mechanism for parking-sharing programs, which assigns private parking slot owners to use other owners’ parking slots within a community and compensates them in the meanwhile. This mechanism extends the availability of some shared slots for external drivers. To ensure practicality, this study addresses two crucial issues: (i) robust assignment of parking slots to mitigate parking conflicts caused by user unpunctuality and (ii) revenue allocation encouraging owner participation through truthful report of inconvenience costs coefficient for using others’ slots. To address the first issue, we propose a distributionally robust approach that leverages a data-driven method to estimate potential conflicts in parking schedules. For the second issue, we introduce an equitable owner-Pareto-optimal core-selecting payment rule under a cooperative game setting, which prevents collusion among owners and encourages owners to truthfully report the inconvenience cost coefficients for satisfying compensation. An efficient algorithm with core constraint generation is further developed to calculate the payments within a reasonable computational time. Several practical extensions are also presented. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed mechanism significantly outperforms the existing matching approach without owner cooperation in terms of parking slot utilization, fulfillment ratio of demand, and platform income. This paper demonstrates the performance of intra-owner-cooperation mechanism, which ultimately enhances the overall system welfare jointly enjoyed by slot owners, drivers, and the platform.