A decision support system for vehicle relocation operations in carsharing systems

This paper presents a novel three-phase optimization-trend-simulation (OTS) decision support system for carsharing operators to determine a set of near-optimal manpower and operating parameters for the vehicle relocation problem. Tested on a set of commercially operational data from a carsharing company in Singapore, the simulation results suggest that the manpower and parameters recommended by the OTS system lead to a reduction in staff cost of 50%, a reduction in zero-vehicle-time ranging between 4.6% and 13.0%, a maintenance of the already low full-port-time and a reduction in number of relocations ranging between 37.1% and 41.1%. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.