Repoux, Martin and Kaspi, Mor and Boyacı, Burak and Geroliminis, Nikolas (2018) On-line proactive relocation strategies in station-based one-way car-sharing systems. In: STRC 2018 – 18th Swiss Transport Research Conference, 2018-05-16 - 2019-05-18, Monte Verita.
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Abstract
In this work, we study the integration of relocation activities and system regulations in the operation of one-way car-sharing systems. Specifically, we consider the on-line proactive planning of relocations in a one-way station-based car-sharing system that implements a complete journey reservation policy. Under such policy, a user’s request is accepted only if at the booking time, a vehicle is available at the origin station and a parking spot is available at the destination station. If a request is accepted, the vehicle is reserved until the user arrives at the vehicle and the spot is reserved until the user returns the vehicle. Each parking spot may be in one of the following states: empty free spot, empty reserved spot, available vehicle and reserved vehicle. The reserved vehicles/spots provide additional information regarding spots/vehicles that are about to become available. We thus propose utilizing this information in order to plan relocation activities and implement impactful demand shifting strategies. We devise two relocation policies and two demand shifting strategies that are based on the evaluation of the near future states of the system. Using a purpose-built event based simulation, we compare these polices to a state-of-the-art inventory rebalancing policy. An extensive numerical experiment is performed in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed policies under various system configurations.