Cost-effectiveness of one-way EV sharing service with monopoly pricing methodology

Abstract

In a one-way trip car sharing service, users can return vehicles to a station other than the station from which they departed. While this is highly convenient for users, it also leads to an uneven distribution of the number of vehicles at each station. To cope with this, the service operator needs to relocate the vehicles, but the increase in personnel costs for the relocation makes it difficult to operate the service. In addition, when introducing electric vehicles, the remaining battery capacity and the cost of charging electricity must also be taken into account. Therefore, we propose a pricing system that can verify the business feasibility of the car sharing service by taking these factors into account. The proposed system uses a mathematical model to minimize operational costs and a multinomial logit model to predict demand, and then, determines the monopoly price from an economic perspective based on the costs and demand calculated from these models. This study examines the impact on prices and profits by varying the number of electric vehicles in the region where the car sharing system is introduced.