Abstract
In this paper, we consider a station-based electric car-sharing system which allows one-way trips, and uses relocation to re-balance the vehicle distribution. We adopt the point-of-view of a service provider, whose objective is to maximize the profit associated with the trips performed by users. We introduce an exact relocation model for operating hours, and we explicitly consider the consumption and recharge process of electric vehicles batteries. In addition, the model is extended to the relocation operations to be performed at night, namely when the system is not operating. We also describe two model-based heuristics developed to solve the relocation model for operating hours on large-scale systems. The paper is concluded by a set of computational experiments on realistic data derived from an existing car-sharing system. The experiments investigate the scalability of the proposed model and highlight the circumstances under which the relocation operations can improve the system performance.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 234-245 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Omega (United Kingdom) |
| Volume | 81 |
| Early online date | 6 Dec 2017 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2018 |
Funding
This research is performed within the European project e4-share (Models for Ecological, Economical, Efficient, Electric Car-Sharing) funded by FFG (Austria) under grant 847350 , INNOVIRIS (Belgium) and MIUR (Italy) via the Joint Programme Initiative Urban Europe (see http://www.univie.ac.at/e4-share/ for more details). Research activities undertaken by Claudio Gambella in relation to this paper were entirely performed at DEI, University of Bologna. The authors would like to thank Kelvin Cheu for kindly sharing the ICVS data, and two anonymous referees for insightful comments, which helped improving the presentation of the paper. Appendix A
Keywords
- Computational experiments
- Electric car-sharing
- Heuristic algorithms
- Mathematical models
- Operations
- Relocation
