Keyang Zhang

Collaboration in competitive urban distribution systems: parsimonious appraisal, guaranteed incentivisation and distributed coordination

Research

Keyang’s thesis used game theory, mechanism design and simulation to study collaboration between competing operators in urban last-mile delivery: how to appraise the gains from collaboration, design incentives that guarantee them, and coordinate operators in a decentralised way.

Education

2021 – 2025PhD
Imperial College London

Awards and fellowships

2025Unwin Prize for the best PhD thesis
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London

Publications

Sustainable operational strategies for mixed fleets: Integrating autonomous and human-driven taxis with heterogeneous energy types(2025, Communications in Transportation Research)
Last-mile Collaboration: A Decentralized Mechanism with Performance Guarantees and its Implementation(2023, International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems)
The Competition and Inefficiency in Urban Road Last-Mile Delivery(2022, International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems)
Quantifying the Capability of Autonomous Robot-Assisted Distribution in Last-Mile: Insight from Rural to Urban Configurations(2023, 2023 IEEE 26th International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC))