On the prediction of future vehicle locations in free-floating car sharing systems

The free-floating car sharing model is a recently introduced vehicle rental model, which allows customers to return the car anywhere within the operation area, without relying on depot stations. Driven by the flexibility of such a model, the popularity of car sharing has increased rapidly during the last years. However, some critical issues still arise when a user needs to make plans of vehicle usage, since no information is available on future vehicle locations. In this paper, the Vehicle Distance Prediction (VDP) approach is proposed, aimed to predict the distance of the nearest available vehicle at a given future instant. This technique shows great potential also for the service manager, e.g. vehicles could be moved in advance by the staff to balance the fleet distribution. The effectiveness of the proposed prediction approach is assessed on a real dataset taken from a car sharing service in Milan, Italy.