Application of Simulation Method and Regression Analysis to Optimize Car Operations in Carsharing Services: A Case Study in South Korea

Abstract

A carsharing service is a form of public transportation that enables a group of people to share vehicles based at certain stations by making reservations in advance. One of the common problems of carsharing is that companies can have difficulty optimizing the number of vehicles in operation. This paper reports on investigations of the relationship between the number of cars and the number of reservations per day with either the acceptance ratio or utilization ratio based on the commercially-operational dataset of a carsharing company in Korea. A discrete event simulation is run to analyze a round-trip service for every possible number of cars and number of reservations with the output acceptance ratio and utilization ratio. The simulation data revealed that increasing the number of reservations with respect to a certain number of cars will decrease the acceptance ratio, thus increasing the percentage of the utilization ratio. Based on the simulation data results, a rational regression model can achieve high precision when predicting the acceptance ratio or the utilization ratio compared to other prediction algorithms such as the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and the Radial Basis Function (RBF) models. K-means clustering was used to understand the pattern and provide additional policies for carsharing companies. Consequently, opening a carsharing business is very promising in terms of profit, escalating the level of customer satisfaction. In addition, a small reduction in the utilization ratio by operators will create a large increase in the acceptance ratio.