Rebalancing of One-Way Car-Sharing Systems Considering Elastic Demand and Waiting Time

This paper studies a vehicle rebalancing problem subject to nonlinear elastic demand and waiting time window for one-way car-sharing systems with charging delay and reservation policy. Firstly, we model the one-way car-sharing system as a mixed Basket-Chandy-Muntz-Palacios (BCMP) queuing network considering: 1) elastic origin-destination demands; 2) passenger waiting time; 3) limited parking and charging facilities; and 4) traffic congestion. Moreover, to maximize the commercial value while achieving a favorable balance between passenger experience and business objectives, a joint rebalancing policy with queue stability control and waiting time constraint is given through combining active balancing performed by passengers and passive rebalancing implemented by operators. Finally, a data-driven simulation based on Chengdu’s Didi dataset is conducted, and the policy comparison and sensitivity analysis are executed to illustrate the performance of the presented method.