Leveraging Customer Flexibility for Car-Sharing Fleet Optimization

Abstract

Car-sharing is a precursor to the emerging class of “mobility services” leveraging modern technology to enable access to car-based mobility without the consumer owning the physical asset. Consequently, it plays an increasingly important role for urban mobility. Two-way station-based systems, where the customer picks up and returns a car at a single designated station, are the most common type of car-sharing solution. While these systems are most common in practice, they have attracted limited research activity from the optimization community. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the potentials of spatial and temporal customer flexibility to achieve better supply-demand alignment. To this end, we assess both the value and the cost of customer flexibility. Using a real-world data set with over 50,000 car-sharing reservations from a midsized German city, we assess the potential benefits of customer flexibility under offline and online optimization. The offline results indicate that temporal flexibility...