A Holistic Decision Making Framework for a Vehicle Sharing System

Abstract

The vehicle sharing systems (VSSs) are becoming more and more popular due to both financial and environmental effects. On the other hand, they face many challenges, such as inventory management of the vehicles and parking spots, imbalance of the vehicles, pricing strategies, and demand forecasting. If these are not addressed properly, the system experiences a significant loss of customers and therefore revenue. Although efficient methods to solve these problems are well-studied in the literature, there does not exist any work in the literature which considers a VSS as a whole, and identifies and analyzes all of its components and their relations, to the best of our knowledge. Therefore, this work provides a new framework for a VSS management from a wider perspective by addressing the components and their relations with the inclusion of a time dimension. The proposed framework is aimed to apply for any kind of VSS. After addressing as many problems as possible related to a VSS, we will focus on the application of the framework to the light electric vehicle (LEV) sharing system.