Optimization of dynamic relocation operations for one-way electric carsharing systems

Abstract This study developed a new approach for the relocation operations of one-way electric carsharing systems without advanced reservation information. The developed model consists of two parts: relocation needs computation and execution plan generation. In the first part, thresholds and a Station Ruin Prevention Method for relocation computation are proposed. In the second part, an Integer Linear Programming model for relocation plan optimization is formulated. Both Vehicle relocation and the Staff rebalancing are optimized in a unified framework. Furthermore, in order to improve the efficiency of the programming, a zoning scheme was proposed to divide the large-scale network into separate zones. Finally, a simulation model, which was calibrated and validated using the field data, was built to conduct tests on the performance of the proposed method. The results showed that the number of allocation tasks and distance for allocation have been greatly reduced because of the proposed methods, and the computing time can be reduced significantly with a small loss of accomplished tasks under the zoning scheme.