A Decision Model for Free-Floating Car-Sharing Providers for Sustainable and Resilient Supply Chains

Abstract

For green and sustainable supply chains, transportation resilience is a critical issue. Car Sharing is an effective way to improve transportation resilience. The emerging car-sharing industry continues to attract a lot of investment, but few companies in the industry are profitable. Indeed, numerical experiments based on dynamic models in this paper showed that it was challenging for a car-sharing company to be profitable. As the numerical experiments followed the fractional factorial designs, from the factor analysis, it is suggested that a new car-sharing business first study the external business environment. Even if the external environment is sound, the company still needs to pay attention to internal operations management. Moreover, when the company decides the number of cars it owns and the fleet size, it should consider factors including variable daily expenses, maintenance costs, salvage value, and commission.