Optimization of Vehicle Assignment for Car Sharing System

Abstract

Recent advances in information technology enable realization of new on-demand transportation systems. A car sharing system is one of the new on-demand transportation systems and its concept is that people share vehicles to save maintenance cost. A car sharing system is expected as a solution for traffic jams and lack of parkings. There are two types of car sharing systems: the one-way type and the round-trip type. In this paper, we focus on the one-way type. In the one-way type, users can return vehicles to any stations at any time. Thus, it is hard to keep distribution balance of parked vehicles among stations. We propose a method for optimizing vehicle assignment according to distribution balance of parked vehicles. Finally, we report experimental results of our simulation, and evaluate the effect of our method.