Models and Algorithms for Carsharing Systems and Related Problems

Assessing the viability of enabling a round-trip carsharing system to accept one-way trips: Application to Logan Airport in Boston

“…We also evaluate the impacts of relocation operations. This is in contrast to the work of Rickenberg et al (2013), Barrios and Doig (2014), Lopes et al (2014), Nair and Miller-Hooks (2014), and Boyaci et al (2015) in which they develop a model to determine the location and capacity of the stations; or that of George and Xia (2011), Cepolina and Farina (2012), Barrios and Doig (2014), Lopes et al (2014), and Boyaci et al (2015) in which they determine fleet size and distribution; or finally, the work of Todd (1999, 2001), Kek et al (2006, 2009), Nair and MillerHooks (2011, Krumke et al (2013), Jorge et al (2014), Nourinejad and Roorda (2014), Repoux et al (2014), and Boyaci et al (2015), in which they optimize vehicle relocation operations. Moreover, we should note that all of the previous cited research is either on round-trip or one-way services, while ours is unique in that it designs and evaluates hybrid round-trip and one-way systems.…”

“…Combining tactical and operational decisions, Barrios and Doig (2014) and Nourinejad and Roorda (2014) explored the relationship between the existence of vehicle relocations and the fleet size needed to achieve a specified service level. Other authors concentrated their research on operational planning, studying ways to balance vehicle stocks in one-way carsharing systems, including, for example, relocation of vehicles between stations Todd, 1999, 2001;Kek et al, 2006Kek et al, , 2009Nair and MillerHooks, 2011;Krumke et al, 2013;Jorge et al, 2014;Nourinejad and Roorda, 2014;Repoux et al, 2014;Boyaci et al, 2015); user-based relocations (Barth et al, 2004;Uesugi et al, 2007;Febbraro et al, 2012;Weikl and Bogenberger, 2013;Pfrommer et al, 2014;Correia et al, 2014); accepting or refusing a trip (Fan et al, 2008;Correia and Antunes, 2012); station location selection (Correia and Antunes, 2012); and trip pricing (Mitchell et al, 2010;Papanikolaou, 2011;Zhou, 2012). There are also other studies, namely one by Kaspi et al (2014), where parking reservation policies are presented in order to evaluate its impact on system performance.…”

Trip pricing of one-way station-based carsharing networks with zone and time of day price variations

“…Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to mitigate the effects of vehicle stock imbalance where the most extensively studied method is vehicle relocation (Barth and Todd, 1999;Barth et al, 2001;Kek et al, 2006;Kek et al, 2009;Nair and Miller-Hooks, 2011;Krumke et al, 2013;Jorge et al, 2014;Nourinejad and Roorda, 2014;Repoux et al, 2014;Boyaci et al, 2015). Alternative methods were: accepting or refusing a trip based on its impact on vehicle stock balance (Fan et al, 2008;Correia and Antunes, 2012); station location selection to achieve a more favorable distribution of vehicles (Correia and Antunes, 2012), and price incentives for grouping people if they are traveling from a station with a shortage of vehicles, and ungrouping them otherwise (Barth et al, 2004;Uesugi et al, 2007).…”

On the Online Min-Wait Relocation Problem

“…This setting is similar to bikesharing, where trucks can simultaneously move several bikes during the relocation process [4,5]. Since customers of our carsharing system do not book their requests in advance, the main goal is to guarantee a balanced system during working hours (online as in [5,9]) or to set up an appropriate initial state for the morning (static situation as in [4,9]). Both, the online and the static versions are known to be N P-hard [4], and different heuristics have been developed, e.g., by partitioning the problem into subproblems with clustering techniques [11], or by reducing the search space [10].…”