Naslov
Improving carsharing reservation systems by variable quality of service and relocations operations

Autori
Molnar, Goran ; Correia, Gonçalo Homem de Almeida

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Skup
18th Euro Working Group on Transportation, EWGT 2015 14-16 July 2015, Delft, The Netherlands

Mjesto i datum
Delft, Nizozemska, 14.07.2015. - 16.07.2015

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
free-floating carsharing; metaheuristic; optimisation; reservation; relocations; vehicle locking; quality of service

Sažetak
Carsharing systems offer the possibility of using a car without having to own it. Typical use case consists of a user taking the nearest available vehicle, travelling to the desired destination(s) and leaving the car on a suitable location after use. Since mobility patterns change along the day, the user has no guarantee that his area will have a vehicle available at a desired departure time. To help solve this problem and improve customer satisfaction, some operators are offering vehicle reservations. Such services give users the guarantee that a car will be available at their desired location and time. A simple strategy to assure that is vehicle locking, whereby a car in the agreed pick-up location is locked from the moment of the reservation until it is taken. However, this method reduces car utilization since locked cars cannot be accessed by any other user. Notable losses can be caused by having too much idle time in the fleet and various approaches have been tested to reduce these undesirable effects. Some providers are allowing only very short reservations (e.g. 30 minutes before the trip). Others are providing free short reservations and charging longer ones which discourages long reservations and compensates economic impact of reduced fleet use. While they can keep the system profitable, both of these constraints significantly limit usability of the reservation service, rendering it unsuitable or expensive for trips that are planned more than a very short time ahead. In this paper, we propose an innovative technique that combines relocations with vehicle locking to make reservations possible for longer periods as well as to ensure, even not allowing the user to choose their car, that the reserved cars are dropped-off close to the user. In our model, a free-floating carsharing system is operating in a city divided into a set of cells, with guaranteed reservation time and vehicle-to-user proximity defined for each cell independently. The devised model allows estimating traffic and profit depending on these parameters. We use a metaheuristic optimisation technique to discover regions of the city where reservation times can be increased while retaining the system profitable. The proposed technique is tested on a case study of simulated carsharing trips during a typical working day in the Lisbon municipality, Portugal.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Računarstvo, Tehnologija prometa i transport

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