The 20th and 21st joint COTA International Conference of Transportation Professionals (CICTP 2020-21)

During the last few years, electric car sharing (ECs) systems have continued to develop as an important shared mobility mode, which have been presented in many cities around the world, e.g. Paris, Berlin, and Geneva. Recently, a new system named “one-way” releases the constraint of returning the car to the origin station, and optimally extends the application of the system. However, the freedom of returning vehicles may induce system imbalance while the numbers of request significantly increase. This paper addresses the issue of redistribution of electric cars to accommodate the real-time demand. Models were proposed to analyze and assess the balancing problem by using Petri Nets (PN) and discrete event simulation. The objectives are to determine the number of unserved users and evaluate the performances of the system, so as to optimize the relocation service launch time to respond to the largest number of requests. The numerical results of simulation indicated that from the demand perspective, the strategy with 50% level of electricity power charging significantly reduced the number of users unserved, which decreased the number of interventions of truck as well as the occurrence of the two extreme cases (i.e. empty and full). Findings of this study may assist for better designing an effective operational management of the electric car sharing systems.

CICTP