Design of non-monetary incentives for efficiency in selfish routing via strategic intersection control

Abstract

Urban transportation networks routinely suffer from inefficiencies caused by selfish routing, whereby individual drivers select routes that minimize their own travel time rather than overall system delay. This decentralized behavior leads to user equilibria that can significantly deviate from system-optimal flows. Although monetary tolls can theoretically eliminate such inefficiencies, their practical, political, and equity-related limitations motivate the development of alternative, non-monetary control mechanisms. This thesis develops and analyzes two intersection-based incentive mechanisms that leverage modern Autonomous Intersection Management (AIM) to influence route choices and steer selfish routing toward socially efficient outcomes without monetary transfers. The first mechanism, termed Strategic Priority-Based Scheduling (SPBS), introduces small, route-dependent priority adjustments at intersections, thereby inducing controlled, path-dependent waiting times. Analytical examples, including Pigou’s network, show that even minimal priority asymmetries can substantially reduce inefficiency. These insights are further validated through high-fidelity microscopic simulations, demonstrating the mechanism’s feasibility under realistic driving and queueing dynamics. The second mechanism generalizes this approach through an analytical framework based on timestamp offsets. Intersections apply small additive adjustments to vehicles’ effective arrival times, inducing path-dependent node delays while preserving uniqueness of equilibrium travel costs, even when multiple equilibrium flows exist. This structure enables a bilevel optimization formulation in which a system planner designs timestamp offsets while anticipating user-equilibrium responses. Calibration using simulation-generated intersection delay data for the Sioux Falls network yields realistic quartic node cost models, and large-scale numerical experiments show that timestamp-based incentives can eliminate up to 68% of the inefficiency at user equilibrium, even under tight operational constraints. Taken together, these results demonstrate that intersections, traditionally viewed as network bottlenecks, can be transformed into powerful non-monetary control instruments. By exploiting the capabilities of modern AIM, the proposed mechanisms provide practical, scalable, and analytically grounded tools for improving network-wide efficiency without relying on tolls or major infrastructure modifications.