Noncooperative and Cooperative Urban Intelligent Systems: Joint Logistic and Charging Incentive Mechanisms

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have become an emerging crucial component of the intelligent transportation system (ITS) in modern smart cities. In particular, coordinated operations of AVs can potentially enhance the quality of public services, e.g., logistic and AV charging services. However, the joint logistic and AV charging scenario involves the sophisticated interactions between a large number of complicated agents, dynamic logistics, and electricity prices in real-world systems. Since AVs are individuals owned by different parties, the design of attractive incentive to motivate them to provide multiple public services becomes a fundamental issue. In this article, we develop an urban intelligent system (UIS) by exploiting the efficient incentive mechanisms, e.g., noncooperative and cooperative game-theoretic approaches, to motivate the AVs to provide logistic and charging services in UIS. For the noncooperative game approach, we formulate the interaction between the selfish AVs and the aggregator as a Stackelberg game. Meanwhile, the aggregator, known as the leader in the game, aims to decide the logistic and electricity trading prices, and then the AVs, executed as the followers, determine their service schedules. Furthermore, considering that all the players are willing to cooperate, we develop a cooperative potential game for the selfless AVs to maximize the social welfare of the UIS. These case studies demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of proposed incentive mechanisms that can motivate EVs to provide high-quality logistic and charging services by maximizing their utilities. Also, both the proposed schemes provide significant system revenues than that of conventional system optimization-based approaches.