Designing a Crowd-Based Relocation System—The Case of Car-Sharing

Alfred Benedikt Brendel, Sascha Lichtenberg, Stefan Morana, Christoph Prinz and Boris M. Hillmann
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Alfred Benedikt Brendel: Chair of Information Systems, esp. Intelligent Systems and Services, Technische Universität Dresden, 01069 Dresden, Germany
Sascha Lichtenberg: Chair of Information Systems, esp. Intelligent Systems and Services, Technische Universität Dresden, 01069 Dresden, Germany
Stefan Morana: Chair of Digital Transformation and Information Systems, Saarland University, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany
Christoph Prinz: Chair of Information Management, Georg-August-University Göttingen, 37073 Göttingen, Germany
Boris M. Hillmann: Your Car GmbH, 37073 Göttingen, Germany

Sustainability, 2022, vol. 14, issue 12, 1-28

Abstract: Car-sharing services promise environmentally sustainable and cost-efficient alternatives to private car ownership, contributing to more environmentally sustainable mobility. However, the challenge of balancing vehicle supply and demand needs to be addressed for further improvement of the service. Currently, employees must relocate vehicles from low-demand to high-demand areas, which generates extra personnel costs, driven kilometers, and emissions. This study takes a Design Science Research (DSR) approach to develop a new way of balancing the supply and demand of vehicles in car-sharing, namely crowd-based relocation. We base our approach on crowdsourcing, a concept by which customers are requested to perform vehicle relocations. This paper reports on our comprehensive DSR project on designing and instantiating a crowd-based relocation information system (CRIS). We assessed the resulting artifact in a car-sharing simulation and conducted a real-world car-sharing service system field test. The evaluation reveals that CRIS has the potential for improving vehicle availability, increasing environmental sustainability, and reducing operational costs. Further, the prescriptive knowledge derived in our DSR project can be used as a starting point to improve individual parts of the CRIS and to extend its application beyond car-sharing into other sharing services, such as power bank- or e-scooter-sharing.

Keywords: sharing economy; car-sharing; supply and demand management; vehicle relocation; crowdsourcing; green is/it; design science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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