Terry Lee Friesz, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor Terry Lee Friesz, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Keywords:
dynamic pricing differential games urban freight
Abstract:
This thesis proposes a dynamic, game-theoretic model of dynamic pricing in an urban freight environment with three distinct agent types: sellers, transporters and receivers. The sellers and transporters are modeled as non-cooperative Nash agents. The sellers compete to capture receiver demands, while the transporters compete to capture the transportation demand generated by the seller-receiver transactions. Each competing agent’s best response problem is formulated as an optimal control problem and the set of these coupled optimal control problems is transformed into a differential variational inequality representing the general Nash equilibrium problem. A time discretization approximation is utilized to recast the game as a finite dimensional nonlinear complementarity problem. The solution of a small numerical example gives insights into the equilibrium strategies of the different agents in an urban freight system.
