A Discrete-Event Simulation Approach for the Management of a Car Sharing Service

The Car Sharing (CS) systems are promising services that are complementary to the traditional public transport forms and ensure a good level of flexibility and comfort. However, in order to make such systems efficient and competitive, suitable planning and management strategies are required. In this paper we deal with a crucial problem of the CS system management: the vehicle relocation problem. In order to obtain an as accurate as possible representation of the behavioral aspects of the CS service, a modeling approach based on the Unified Modeling Language has been used. Moreover, the proposed management strategies are analyzed and assessed by a discrete event simulation that considers a real case study in different scenarios.