Atac, S., Obrenovic, N., and Bierlaire, M.

Comparing different rebalancing operations strategies in car sharing systems: A generic optimization framework

Speaker: Atac Selin

18th Swiss Operations Research Days, Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW)

June 03, 2022

Car sharing (CS) services have become popular due to their financial and environmental benefits. The CS operators have offered flexibility by allowing one-way trips which resulted in vehicle imbalance in the service area. They have then introduced rebalancing operations to reduce the imbalance thus, to increase the level of service. In general, the methods studied in the literature focus on demand forecasting to determine the rebalancing strategy. However, in a dynamic system where the user behavior changes, evaluating different strategies and selecting the most appropriate one is essential. Therefore, this work proposes a framework which compares different strategies to solve rebalancing operations in one-way station-based car sharing systems in terms of cost and level of service. Since it is exhausting to collect the data to develop a demand model, we feed the trip demand output of Multi-Agent Transport Simulation Toolkit (MATSim) as an input to our framework. This also allows us to explore the different uncertainties that can occur in the system, such as fluctuations in trip demand. The results of the framework help the decision maker to better analyze the system and choose the best rebalancing policy under different scenarios.