On the Performance of a One-way Car Sharing System in Suburban Areas: A Real-world Use Case

Haitam M. Laarabi, Chiara Boldrini, Raffaele Bruno, Helen Porter, Peter Davidson

2017

Abstract

In recent years, one-way car sharing systems have gained momentum across the world with their promise to encourage more sustainable urban mobility models. However, economic viability of car sharing is still uncertain due to high investment cost for station and fleet deployment, as well as high operation cost for fleet management and rebalancing. Furthermore, existing car sharing are typically confined to city centres with significant business and residential concentrations. In this study, we evaluate the performance of a novel one-way car sharing system that will be deployed in a suburban area of the city of Lyon using a detailed multi-agent and multi-modal transport simulation model. Data from a recent large-scale household travel survey is used to determine the travel demands on different transportation alternatives. We analyse the impact of different coverage constraints on the system capacity in terms of number of trips and vehicle availability. We also investigate the potential of user-based relocation strategies to increase the efficiency of the car sharing service. The model shows that: (i) the car sharing system is most sensitive to the infrastructure and fleet sizes, and (ii) user-based relocation does not have a significant impact on the total number of car sharing trips.

References

  1. Balmer, M., Cetin, N., Nagel, K., and Raney, B. (2004). Towards truly agent-based traffic and mobility simulations. In Proc. of AAMS'04, pages 60-67. IEEE Computer Society.
  2. Barth, M. and Shaheen, S. (2002). Shared-use vehicle systems: Framework for classifying carsharing, station cars, and combined approaches. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, (1791):105-112.
  3. Barth, M. and Todd, M. (1999). Simulation model performance analysis of a multiple station shared vehicle system. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 7(4):237-259.
  4. Barth, M., Todd, M., and Xue, L. (2004). User-based vehicle relocation techniques for multiple-station shareduse vehicle systems.
  5. Boldrini, C., Bruno, R., and Conti, M. (2016). Characterising demand and usage patterns in a large stationbased car sharing system. In The 2nd IEEE INFOCOM Workshop on Smart Cities and Urban Computing.
  6. Bonsall, P. (1982). Microsimulation: its application to car sharing. Transportation Research Part A: General, 16(5):421-429.
  7. Boyaci, B., Zografos, K. G., and Geroliminis, N. (2015). An optimization framework for the development of efficient one-way car-sharing systems. European Journal of Operational Research, 240(3):718-733.
  8. Ciari, F., Schuessler, N., and Axhausen, K. W. (2013). Estimation of Carsharing Demand Using an ActivityBased Microsimulation Approach: Model Discussion and Some Results. International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, 7(1):70-84.
  9. Clemente, M., Fanti, M. P., Mangini, A. M., and Ukovich, W. (2013). The vehicle relocation problem in car sharing systems: modeling and simulation in a petri net framework. In International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets and Concurrency, pages 250-269. Springer.
  10. de Almeida Correia, G. H. and Antunes, A. P. (2012). Optimization approach to depot location and trip selection in one-way carsharing systems. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 48(1):233-247.
  11. ESPRIT (2015). Esprit h2020 eu project - easily distributed personal rapid transit. http://www.esprit-transportsystem.eu/. Accessed: 2016-12-12.
  12. Farahani, R. Z., Asgari, N., Heidari, N., Hosseininia, M., and Goh, M. (2012). Covering problems in facility location: A review. Computers & Industrial Engineering, pages 368-407.
  13. Febbraro, A., Sacco, N., and Saeednia, M. (2012). One-way carsharing: solving the relocation problem. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, (2319):113-120.
  14. George, D. K. and Xia, C. H. (2011). Fleet-sizing and service availability for a vehicle rental system via closed queueing networks. European Journal of Operational Research, 211(1):198-207.
  15. Hampshire, R. and Gaites, C. (2011). Peer-to-peer carsharing: Market analysis and potential growth. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, (2217):119-126.
  16. Herrmann, S., Schulte, F., and Voß, S. (2014). Increasing acceptance of free-floating car sharing systems using smart relocation strategies: a survey based study of car2go hamburg. In International Conference on Computational Logistics, pages 151-162. Springer.
  17. Jorge, D., Correia, G. H., and Barnhart, C. (2014). Comparing optimal relocation operations with simulated relocation policies in one-way carsharing systems. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 15(4):1667-1675.
  18. Kek, A., Cheu, R., and Chor, M. (2006). Relocation simulation model for multiple-station shared-use vehicle systems. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, (1986):81-88.
  19. Kek, A. G., Cheu, R. L., Meng, Q., and Fung, C. H. (2009). A decision support system for vehicle relocation operations in carsharing systems. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 45(1):149-158.
  20. Laarabi, M. H. and Bruno, R. (2016). A generic software framework for car sharing modelling based on a largescale multi-agent traffic simulation platform. InAgent Based Modelling of Urban Systems, volume 10051. Springer.
  21. Mitchell, W. J., Borroni-Bird, C. E., and Burns, L. D. (2010). Reinventing the automobile: Personal urban mobility for the 21st century. MIT press.
  22. Nair, R. and Miller-Hooks, E. (2011). Fleet management for vehicle sharing operations. Transportation Science, 45(4):524-540.
  23. Pavone, M., Smith, S. L., Frazzoli, E., and Rus, D. (2012). Robotic load balancing for mobility-on-demand systems. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 31(7):839-854.
  24. Uesugi, K., Mukai, N., and Watanabe, T. (2007). Optimization of vehicle assignment for car sharing system. In International Conference on KnowledgeBased and Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, pages 1105-1111. Springer.
  25. Vairani, F. (2009). bitCar: design concept for a collapsible stackable city car. PhD thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  26. Weikl, S. and Bogenberger, K. (2013). Relocation Strategies and Algorithms for Free-Floating Car Sharing Systems. IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems MagazineI, 5(4):100-111.
  27. Zhang, R. and Pavone, M. (2016). Control of robotic mobility-on-demand systems: a queueing-theoretical perspective. The International Journal of Robotics Research, 35(1-3):186-203.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Laarabi H., Boldrini C., Bruno R., Porter H. and Davidson P. (2017). On the Performance of a One-way Car Sharing System in Suburban Areas: A Real-world Use Case . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems - Volume 1: VEHITS, ISBN 978-989-758-242-4, pages 102-110. DOI: 10.5220/0006307901020110


in Bibtex Style

@conference{vehits17,
author={Haitam M. Laarabi and Chiara Boldrini and Raffaele Bruno and Helen Porter and Peter Davidson},
title={On the Performance of a One-way Car Sharing System in Suburban Areas: A Real-world Use Case},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems - Volume 1: VEHITS,},
year={2017},
pages={102-110},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006307901020110},
isbn={978-989-758-242-4},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Vehicle Technology and Intelligent Transport Systems - Volume 1: VEHITS,
TI - On the Performance of a One-way Car Sharing System in Suburban Areas: A Real-world Use Case
SN - 978-989-758-242-4
AU - Laarabi H.
AU - Boldrini C.
AU - Bruno R.
AU - Porter H.
AU - Davidson P.
PY - 2017
SP - 102
EP - 110
DO - 10.5220/0006307901020110