Network flow oriented approaches for vehicle sharing relocation problems

Abstract

Managing a one-way vehicle sharing system means periodically moving free access vehicles from excess to deficit stations in order to avoid local shortages. We propose and study here several network flow oriented models and algorithms which deal with a static version of this problem while unifying preemption and non preemption as well as carrier riding cost, vehicle riding time and carrier number minimization. Those network flow models are vehicle driven, which means that they focus on the way vehicles are exchanged between excess and deficit stations. We perform a lower bound and approximation analysis which leads us to the design and test of several heuristics. One of them involves implicit dynamic network handling.