Carsharing operations policies: a comparison between one-way and two-way systems

Mehdi Nourinejad () and Matthew Roorda ()

Transportation, 2015, vol. 42, issue 3, 497-518

Abstract: Carsharing organizations are shared-mobility services which allow users to share vehicles of a fleet. These services are divided into one-way and two-way systems. Two-way systems require users to return the vehicles to their original pick up stations whereas one-ways systems do not. We present a hybrid system that has features of both. Two integer programming optimization models are formulated. The first model, called the fleet size problem (FSP), is for tactical planning and calculates the required fleet size in order to answer all the demand in various market segments where every market segment is composed of some direct-trip and some round-trip users. This model also accounts for vehicle relocation between stations. In reality, however, fleet size is fixed for day-to-day operations. With a specified fleet size, not all users are necessarily served unless the fleet size is quite large compared to the demand. Therefore, a second operational model, called profit maximization problem (PMP), selects from a list of user requests those who profit the service-provider the most. Data from Autoshare, a carsharing company in Toronto, is used to assess the models. Results of the FSP model indicate that one-way systems require the lowest fleet size but highest vehicle relocation hours. Two-way systems are relatively insensitive to the market segment and the hybrid system’s performance is dependent on the market segment scenario. The PMP model shows that the one-way (two-way) system is most beneficial to direct-trip (round-trip) users. The hybrid system is the only system without user surplus costs. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Carsharing; Decision support system; Optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11116-015-9604-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:transp:v:42:y:2015:i:3:p:497-518

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11116/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11116-015-9604-3

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation is currently edited by Kay W. Axhausen

More articles in Transportation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().