TY - JOUR
T1 - A game theoretic model for re-optimizing a railway timetable
AU - Fragnelli, Vito
AU - Sanguineti, Simona
PY - 2014/6
Y1 - 2014/6
N2 - The Setting: In the Nineties of the last century the European Commission decided to open the railway market to competition, allowing different railway companies to operate on the same network. Under this framework Infrastructure Managers have to allocate capacity in order to define the timetable, dealing with possible slot conflicts between competing Transport Operators. The Problem: An efficient train scheduling requires collecting a lot of information from the Transport Operators, but it may not be in their interests to reveal their private information. Therefore, it may be useful for real-world applications to design methods that provide incentives to Transport Operators for cooperating with the aim of increasing their utility; moreover, this may result in an improvement of the efficiency even for the Infrastructure Managers, so they also have incentives for favouring the cooperation. The Proposal: In this paper we propose a game theoretical model in which the agents (Transport Operators) exchange information on their needs and are compensated by a possible increasing of their utility. This approach represents the situation as a coalition formation problem. In particular, we refer to the C-Solution proposed by Gerber (Rev Econ Design 5:149-175, 1), which is applied to some examples, each with different features. This model requires that information is revealed to a small number of competitors. This is rather important in a market currently still characterized by operator reluctance to an indiscriminate diffusion of information. Furthermore, the low dimension of the problem allows having a low computational complexity.
AB - The Setting: In the Nineties of the last century the European Commission decided to open the railway market to competition, allowing different railway companies to operate on the same network. Under this framework Infrastructure Managers have to allocate capacity in order to define the timetable, dealing with possible slot conflicts between competing Transport Operators. The Problem: An efficient train scheduling requires collecting a lot of information from the Transport Operators, but it may not be in their interests to reveal their private information. Therefore, it may be useful for real-world applications to design methods that provide incentives to Transport Operators for cooperating with the aim of increasing their utility; moreover, this may result in an improvement of the efficiency even for the Infrastructure Managers, so they also have incentives for favouring the cooperation. The Proposal: In this paper we propose a game theoretical model in which the agents (Transport Operators) exchange information on their needs and are compensated by a possible increasing of their utility. This approach represents the situation as a coalition formation problem. In particular, we refer to the C-Solution proposed by Gerber (Rev Econ Design 5:149-175, 1), which is applied to some examples, each with different features. This model requires that information is revealed to a small number of competitors. This is rather important in a market currently still characterized by operator reluctance to an indiscriminate diffusion of information. Furthermore, the low dimension of the problem allows having a low computational complexity.
KW - Coalition formation
KW - NTU-game
KW - Railway scheduling
KW - Slot allocation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84901356199&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s12544-013-0116-y
DO - 10.1007/s12544-013-0116-y
M3 - Article
SN - 1867-0717
VL - 6
SP - 113
EP - 125
JO - European Transport Research Review
JF - European Transport Research Review
IS - 2
ER -