Title: Incentive Engineering for Smarter and Greener Transportation

Abstract: Climate change is a key societal challenge that needs to be addressed urgently. To do this, governments are increasingly promoting the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. At the same time, new mobility models are emerging that may reduce personal car ownership and promote greener forms of transport. These include on-demand car-sharing schemes that work synergistically with public transport options. However, a key challenge for such approaches is the need to deal with an initially limited infrastructure. Our current electricity network will not support the widespread simultaneous charging of electric vehicles, and early car-sharing schemes have had mixed success due to the limited availability of vehicles. In this talk, I will discuss how we can use techniques from artificial intelligence to utilise limited charging and mobility infrastructures more efficiently. Specifically, I will outline recent work that has used techniques from game theory and mechanism design to model the utility of travellers and introduce incentives that reward more flexible users, while ensuring that those with urgent travel requirements are satisfied first (albeit potentially at a higher price). Using real data from a large-scale electric vehicle trial and from a car-sharing scheme in Grenoble, France, I will show that such incentive engineering has significant potential in enabling smarter and greener transportation.