  A smart city provides its people with high standard of living through
advanced technologies and transport is one of the major foci. With the advent
of autonomous vehicles (AVs), an AV-based public transportation system has been
proposed recently, which is capable of providing new forms of transportation
services with high efficiency, high flexibility, and low cost. For the benefit
of passengers, multitenancy can increase market competition leading to lower
service charge and higher quality of service. In this paper, we study the
pricing issue of the multi-tenant AV public transportation system and three
types of services are defined. The pricing process for each service type is
modeled as a combinatorial auction, in which the service providers, as bidders,
compete for offering transportation services. The winners of the auction are
determined through an integer linear program. To prevent the bidders from
raising their bids for higher returns, we propose a strategy-proof
Vickrey-Clarke-Groves-based charging mechanism, which can maximize the social
welfare, to settle the final charges for the customers. We perform extensive
simulations to verify the analytical results and evaluate the performance of
the charging mechanism.
