Abstract
A carsharing service can be seen as a transport alternative between private and public transport that enables a group of people to share vehicles based at certain stations. The advanced carsharing service, one-way carsharing, enables customers to return the car to another station. However, one-way implementation generates an imbalanced distribution of cars in each station. Thus, this paper proposes forecasting relocation to solve car distribution imbalances for one-way carsharing services. A discrete event simulation model was developed to help evaluate the proposed model performance. A real case dataset was used to find the best simulation result. The results provide a clear insight into the impact of forecasting relocation on high system utilization and the reservation acceptance ratio compared to traditional relocation methods.
Highlights
Increasing numbers of private vehicles provide high flexibility to users, but have several negative impacts, such as congestion, pollution, and excessive energy consumption
Three evaluation criteria were defined in the simulation to evaluate the relocation model performances: car utilization ratio, reservation acceptance ratio, and relocation cost
An accepted reservation means that when a customer makes a reservation, the carsharing reservation system checks whether there is an available car at the departure station and free parking space at the destination station
Summary
Increasing numbers of private vehicles provide high flexibility to users, but have several negative impacts, such as congestion, pollution, and excessive energy consumption. Public transport could be a good alternative, but has several limitations, such as the lack of service flexibility. Carsharing services can be a solution, providing the flexibility of private cars and the benefits of public transport. Previous research has shown the benefits of carsharing systems include cost savings, environmentally friendly transportation, and reducing gas consumption [1,2]. One-way carsharing systems enable a car to be driven between multiple stations, whereas for traditional services (round-trip) users must return the car to the originating station. One-way carsharing systems present operational problems with unbalanced vehicle inventories across the station network [7]. Forecasting models for relocation have been suggested to optimize relocation [12,13]
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