One-Way Car-Sharing Profit Maximization by Means of User-Based Vehicle Relocation

One-way car-sharing systems, which allow customers to return vehicles to the stations where they were picked up, offer greater flexibility compared to conventional car-sharing services. Nevertheless, to guarantee this flexibility, such systems have to face difficult problems of vehicle relocation in order to be ready to satisfy as many trip reservations as possible. This paper proposes a user-based relocation methodology in which the users may accept to leave the car in a different location in exchange for fare discounts. To this aim, a two-stage optimization problem is formulated for optimizing the alternative destinations proposed to users and for maximizing the profit of car-sharing operators. The extensive analysis of results shows that, with the proposed user-based relocation strategy and without the operator-based relocation, the number of rejected reservations can be significantly reduced, even with a relatively small number of vehicles and, at the same time, the operator's profit can be increased.