English

A Stochastic Model for Car-Sharing Systems

Probability 2015-04-16 v1 Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems

Abstract

Vehicle-sharing systems are becoming important for urban transportation. In these systems, users arrive at a station, pick up a vehicle, use it for a while and then return it to another station of their choice. Depending on the type of system, there might be a possibility to book vehicles before picking-up and/or a parking space at the chosen arrival station. Each station has a finite capacity and cannot host more vehicles and reserved parking spaces than its capacity. We propose a stochastic model for an homogeneous car-sharing system with possibility to reserve a parking space at the arrival station when picking-up a car. We compute the performance of the system and the optimal fleet size according to a specific metric. It differs from a similar model for bike-sharing systems because of reservation that induces complexity, especially when traffic increases.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.03844,
  title  = {A Stochastic Model for Car-Sharing Systems},
  author = {Cédric Bourdais and Christine Fricker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.03844},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:16:22.305Z