Method for prediction of Utilization Rate of Electric Vehicle Free-Floating Car Sharing Services using Data Mining

Free-floating car sharing is a form of car rental used by people for short periods of time where the cars can be picked up and returned anywhere within a given area. In this paper, we have collected free-floating car sharing data, for electric as well as fossil fueled cars, and data regarding e.g. size of the city, number of cars in the service, etc. The utilization rates of the free-floating car sharing services vary much between the cities, greatly influencing the success of the services. This paper presents the most important factors influencing the utilization rate, and also a methodology to predict the utilization rate for new cities, using data mining based on Random Forests.