REBALANCING AND FLEET SIZING OF MOBILITY-ON-DEMAND NETWORKS WITH COMBINED SIMULATION, OPTIMIZATION AND QUEUEING NETWORK ANALYSIS

Car rental companies have to operate the fleet of vehicles considering a cost effective fleet sizing and rebalancing of the vehicles. Additionally, they have to ensure a good vehicle availability at the rental stations. We present a simulation model combined with optimization and queueing network analysis for mobility-on-demand networks with one-way car sharing. The system is modeled as a closed queueing network. On the one hand, this allows an estimation of the vehicle availability; on the other hand, constraints for the optimization model can be derived from the mathematical equations of the queuing network model. To optimize the total revenue, the optimization model considers price incentives for customer trips and cost of empty trips resulting in a mixed-integer linear programming problem. The simulation uses the optimization component for an optimized operation of the mobility-on-demand networks and computes the optimal fleet size, the cost of empty runs, and the vehicle availability.