Information Design for Regulating Traffic Flows under Uncertain Network State
Name
1908.07105.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
470.41 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
f7d20946b1c280908bf13b1604f4b495
Author(s)
Wu, Manxi
Amin, Saurabh
Date Issued
September 2019
Journal
2019 57th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing
Publisher
IEEE
Citation
Wu, Manxi, and Saurabh Amin. "Information Design for Regulating Traffic Flows under Uncertain Network State." 57th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL, USA, September 2019, IEEE, 2019.
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
Traffic navigation services have gained widespread adoption in recent years. The route recommendations generated by these services often leads to severe congestion on urban streets, raising concerns from neighboring residents and city authorities. This paper is motivated by the question: How can a transportation authority design an information structure to induce a preferred equilibrium traffic flow pattern in uncertain network conditions? We approach this question from a Bayesian persuasion viewpoint. We consider a basic routing game with two parallel routes and an uncertain state that affects the travel cost on one of the routes. The authority sends a noisy signal of the state to a given fraction of travelers. The information structure (i.e. distribution of signals in each state) chosen by the authority creates a heterogeneous information environment for the routing game. The solution concept governing the travelers' route choices is Bayesian Wardrop Equilibrium. We design an information structure to minimize the average traffic spillover - the amount of equilibrium route flow exceeding a preferred limit - on one of the routes. We provide an analytical characterization of the optimal information structure for any fraction of travelers receiving the signal. We find that the optimal information structure can achieve the minimum spillover so long as the fraction of travelers receiving the signal is larger than a threshold (smaller than 1).
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1109/allerton.2019.8919906
