Candidate: Haitham Masaud Amar
Title: Strategic Trip Planning: Striking a Balance Between Competition and Cooperation
Date: November 29, 2017
Time: 11:00 AM
Place: E5 4106-4128
Supervisor(s): Basir, Otman
Abstract:
In intelligent transportation systems, cooperative mobility planning is considered to be one of the challenging problems. Mobility planning as it stands today is an individual decision-making effort that takes place in an environment governed by the collective actions of various competing travellers. Despite the extensive research on mobility planning, a situation in which multiple behavioural-driven travellers participate in a cooperative endeavour to help each other optimize their objectives has not been investigated. Furthermore, due to the inherent multi-participant nature of the mobility problem, the existing solutions fail to produce ground truth optimal mobility plans in the practical sense - despite their claimed and well proven theoretical optimality.
We
propose
a
multi-module
team
mobility
planning
framework
to
address
the
team
trip
planning
problem
with
a
particular
emphasis
on
modelling
the
interaction
between
behaviour-driven
rational
travellers.
The
framework
accommodates
the
travellers’
individual
behaviours,
preferences,
and
goals
in
cooperative
and
competitive
scenarios.
The
individual
behaviours
of
the
travellers
and
their
interaction
processes
are
viewed
as
a
team
trip
planning
game.
For
this
game,
a
theoretical
analysis
is
presented,
which
includes
an
analysis
of
the
existence
and
the
balancedness
of
the
final
solution.
The proposed framework is composed of three principal modules: cooperative trip planning, team formation, and traveller-centric trip planning (TCTP). The cooperative trip planning module deploys a bargaining model to manage conflicts between the travellers that could occur in their endeavour to discover a general, satisfactory solution. The number of players and their interaction process is controlled by the team formation module. The TCTP module adopts an alternative perspective to the individualized trip-planning problem in the sense that it is being behavioural driven problem. This allows for multitudes of traveler centric objectives and constraints, as well as aspects of the environment as they pertain to the traveller’s preferences, to be incorporated in the process. Within the scope of the team mobility planning framework, the TCTP is utilized to supply the travellers with personalized strategies that are incorporated in the cooperative game. The concentration problem is used in this thesis to demonstrate the effectiveness of the TCTP module as a behavioural-driven trip planner. Finally, to validate the theoretical set-up of the team trip planning game, we introduce the territory sharing problem for social taxis. We use the team mobility framework as a basis to solve the problem. Furthermore, we present an argument for the convergence and the efficiency of a coarse correlated equilibrium. In addition to the validation of a variety of theoretical concepts, the territory sharing problem is used to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework in dealing with cooperative mobility planning problems.