2025/11/10 by Matteo Cederle, Cederle, Matteo, Saverio Bolognani +3
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Transportation and Mobility Innovations #Transportation Planning and Optimization #Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.07225
Mobility-on-demand systems like ride-hailing have transformed urban transportation, but they have also exacerbated socio-economic inequalities in access to these services, also due to surge pricing strategies. Although several fairness-aware frameworks have been proposed in smart mobility, they often overlook the temporal and situational variability of user urgency that shapes real-world transportation demands. This paper introduces a non-monetary, Karma-based mechanism that models endogenous urgency, allowing user time-sensitivity to evolve in response to system conditions as well as external factors. We develop a theoretical framework maintaining the efficiency and fairness guarantees of classical Karma economies, while accommodating this realistic user behavior modeling. Applied to a simplified simulated mobility-on-demand scenario, we provide a proof-of-concept illustration of the proposed framework, showing that it exhibits promising behavior in terms of system efficiency and equitable resource allocation, while acknowledging that a full treatment of realistic MoD complexity remains an important direction for future work.