Generalized Stable User Matching for Autonomous Vehicle Co-Ownership Programs

Abstract

We investigate a new form of car-sharing system that can be introduced in the market for autonomous vehicles called fractional ownership or co-ownership. Although dynamic ride sharing provides ad hoc shared mobility services without any long-term commitment, we consider co-ownership programs with which users can still "own" a car with committed usage and ownership. We assume that an autonomous vehicle is shared by a group of users, which is only accessible by the group. We use stable matching to help users find an appropriate group with which to share an autonomous vehicle and present a generalized stable matching model that allows flexible sizes of groups as well as various alternative objectives. We also present a heuristic algorithm to improve computational time owing to the combinatorial properties of the problem.