Evaluating Mobility Service Providers’ Strategies in an Activity-Based Supernetwork

Abstract

A Mathematical Problem with Equilibrium Constraints (MPEC) is formulated to capture the relationships between multiple Mobility Service Providers (MSPs) and the users of a multimodal transport network. The network supply structure is represented as a supernetwork where users’ daily activity chains are represented sequentially and their modal choices to reach different destinations are based on the mobility services active in each connection. At the upper level, a profit maximization formulation is introduced to describe MSPs’ behaviour. At the lower level, groups of users choose the routes with the lowest cost, according to Wardrop’s first equilibrium principle. Due to non-separable interactions between supernetwork links, the equilibrium conditions defining users travel behaviour are written as Variational Inequality (VI). Finally, a numerical example is presented in order to show the characteristics of the model when carsharing, bus and private car are available in the network.