Alessandro Farina

Urban car sharing: An overview of relocation strategies

Traditional car sharing systems are round trip shared vehicle systems and require advance reservations. The advances of GPS, communication techniques and vehicle automation allow us to improve car-sharing systems and to provide users with greater flexibility. As it concerns reservation, new car sharing systems offer users open-ended reservation and/or instant access. As it concerns the trip topology, new car sharing systems are multiple station shared vehicle systems (MSSVS). Round trips still occur in this type of system; however there are a large number of one-way trips made between the multiple stations. Operating an MSSVS is much more difficult than operating a round trip shared vehicle system. The problem is that the system can quickly become imbalanced with respect to the number of vehicles at the multiple stations. A review of user-based and operator-based relocation strategies is provided in the paper, as well as some details about some new possible car sharing systems, where vehicles are fully automated and can be accessed from any point within the intervention area.

Innovative strategies for urban car-sharing systems and a simulator to assess their performance

In this paper, three innovative car-sharing systems for urban areas are proposed, based on fleets of individual intelligent vehicles with three service characteristics: instant access, open-ended reservations and one-way trips. These features provide high flexibility but create an uneven distribution of vehicles among stations. Therefore, relocation of vehicles must be performed. Three different system procedures are proposed: in the first system, relocations are performed by users; in the other two, vehicles relocate automatically, thanks to their automation. In the first two systems, vehicles are accessible only at stations, whereas in the third they are also accessible along roads. In order to provide transport managers with a tool to test systems in different realities, an object-oriented simulator is developed. The simulation provides outputs of system performance, in terms of user waiting times and system efficiency. The proposed systems are simulated for the city of Genoa, in Italy, and a comparative analysis is presented.

A new user based system for historical city centres

The paper concerns the conceptual design of a new car-sharing system for historical city centres and the simulation of the system for the historical city centre of Genoa. The application fields of the system are historical city centres characterised by narrow streets and interactions with high pedestrian flows. The proposed transport system is based on a fleet of Personal Intelligent City Accessible Vehicles (PICAV). The following specific services are provided: instant access, open ended reservation and one way trips. Vehicles can be accessed and returned only at parking lots. These parking lots are placed in locations on the historical city centre border close to interchange points with public transportation. PICAV users are generated at these parking lots during the simulation. The authors assume the existence of a system supervisor who is in charge of addressing at least part of the PICAV users to specific parking lots. The supervisor, according with: the current waiting times at parking lots; the number of PICAV units available in each parking lot; the choice set Di of user i; assigns a parking lot to the user that has to be reasonable from both the point of view of the flexible user and of the fleet manager. An object-oriented simulator has been developed. Given an area, the localization of the PICAV parking lots, the fleet of PICAV units at each parking lot at the beginning of the simulation time and the PICAV transport demand, the simulator is able to provide the distribution of waiting times at each parking lot. This result enables one to dimension the fleet in order to have a given percentile of the distribution of user waiting times less than a given threshold.

An Electro–mobility System for Freight Service in Urban Areas

The paper introduces the problem of reducing impact of freight service trips in urban areas and presents the main design objectives, requirements, and steps of a new fully electric vehicle able to autonomously load and unload palletised or boxed freights. The subject is described under a multidisciplinary point of view integrating the mechatronic design, the efficient power supply system, the intelligent mobility control modules, the strategy for freight delivery planning, through a fleet of these vehicles, based on economic and behavioural modelling.

Improving Bicycle Mobility in Urban Areas Through ITS Technologies: The SaveMyBike Project

This paper describes some ITS solutions and rewarding policies to increase the use of sustainable transport means in urban areas. Firstly, existing policies are described, and the advantages of rewarding systems are presented. Afterwards, the ITS technologies application to monitor mobility modes is described. In this context, the paper presents the SaveMyBike prototypical project and its solutions. SaveMyBike is an anti-theft monitoring system, based on RFID technologies and made of three modules. The first module creates secure urban areas through installed alarms where owners can leave their bike safely. The second module uses fixed RFID gates to monitor journeys and detect stolen bikes. The third module uses portable RFID readers that, during the parking and street control, read in-bike tags, detecting: the stolen bikes, and origins/destinations of bicycle trips. The system is based on rewarding policies, to incentivize people to use their private bikes and public transport modes.

Resource planning in risky environments

The amount of any individual risk acceptance criterion is directly related to the correspondent amount of expected revenue. At the same time, a decision maker often searches for optimal strategies operating under contexts affected both by random events and limited information. This paper is focused on the so-called portfolio risk problem, concerning the risk management of financial resources. The problem leads to an interesting framework that should be applied to other fields, such as risk evaluation and system analysis of transport networks in emergency conditions, as well as risk management forms to improve engineer’s decisions during large projects development.