Evaluation on Integrating Relocation and User Flexibility in Large-Scale One-Way Electric Carsharing Systems

One-way electric carsharing system has become the most widely used form of carsharing service in practice. However, car imbalance, parking shortage, and battery charging jointly impose great challenges upon the operation. Many carsharing operators, e.g., GoFun, offer incentives to flexible users for accepting alternative itineraries and also adopt parking reservation policies. In this paper, we propose a network flow model, where a user's itinerary corresponds to a path in the network, and then develop a new path search heuristic algorithm that iteratively improves a given solution by solving shortest path problems. We use real data from GoFun as an example to conduct extensive computational experiments. The results show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the greedy solution on the first-come-first-serve basis in terms of both profit and service level.