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The car sharing problem

Published: 04 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We consider a novel type of metric task system, termed the car sharing problem, in which the operator of a car sharing program aims to serve the requests of customers occurring at different locations. Requests are modeled as a stochastic process with known parameters and a request is served if a car is located at the position of its occurrence at this time. Customers pay the service provider according to the distance they travel and similarly the service provider incurs cost proportional to the distance traveled when relocating a car from one position to another between requests.
We derive an efficient algorithm to compute a redistribution policy that yields average long-term revenue within a factor of 2 of optimal and provide a complementing proof of APX-hardness. Considering a variation of the problem in which requests occur simultaneously in all locations, we arrive at an interesting repeated balls-into-bins process, for which we prove bounds on the average number of occupied bins.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)A Petri Nets-Based Simulation Methodology for Modular Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Car-Sharing NetworksIEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering10.1109/TASE.2022.318940520:3(1945-1961)Online publication date: Jul-2023
  • (2019)Incentive-Based Approach to Control Demands for Operation of One-Way Carsharing SystemTransportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board10.1177/03611981198374972673:4(427-438)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2019
  • (2019)One-Way Car-Sharing Profit Maximization by Means of User-Based Vehicle RelocationIEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems10.1109/TITS.2018.282411920:2(628-641)Online publication date: Feb-2019
  • Show More Cited By

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SPAA '11: Proceedings of the twenty-third annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
    June 2011
    404 pages
    ISBN:9781450307437
    DOI:10.1145/1989493
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 04 June 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. approximation algorithms
    2. metric task systems
    3. queuing networks

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)A Petri Nets-Based Simulation Methodology for Modular Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Car-Sharing NetworksIEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering10.1109/TASE.2022.318940520:3(1945-1961)Online publication date: Jul-2023
    • (2019)Incentive-Based Approach to Control Demands for Operation of One-Way Carsharing SystemTransportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board10.1177/03611981198374972673:4(427-438)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2019
    • (2019)One-Way Car-Sharing Profit Maximization by Means of User-Based Vehicle RelocationIEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems10.1109/TITS.2018.282411920:2(628-641)Online publication date: Feb-2019
    • (2018)Rebalancing and fleet sizing of mobility-on-demand networks with combined simulation, optimization and queueing network analysisProceedings of the 2018 Winter Simulation Conference10.5555/3320516.3320704(1527-1538)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2018
    • (2017)Secure Free-Floating Car Sharing for Offline CarsProceedings of the Seventh ACM on Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy10.1145/3029806.3029807(349-360)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2017
    • (2016)Design and management of vehicle-sharing systems: a survey of algorithmic approachesSmart Cities and Homes10.1016/B978-0-12-803454-5.00013-4(261-289)Online publication date: 2016
    • (2012)One-Way CarsharingTransportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board10.3141/2319-132319:1(113-120)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2012

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