Evaluating car sharing fleet management strategies using Discrete Event Simulation
Alfred John Chellanthara
Concordia University
Dynamic fleet management is often faced with the problem of managing real time customer requirements and unforeseen events that affect the performance of transport operations. In a car sharing organization, vehicle availability is considered as a measure of quality of service, which is defined by the availability of a car at the time when the user arrives at the station. This thesis presents a decision support tool in order to test the efficiency of a round trip (return to same station) model as compared to a one way (return to any station) model for fleet management in a car sharing organization. The proposed tool employs a discrete event simulation (DES) model which evaluates rejection rate for each of the individual strategies and recommends the one with least number of rejections. A case study is conducted on the CommunAuto car sharing network of Montreal. The results show that the one way model has a greater request rejection rate with an average rejection rate of 13%, while the round trip model has an average rejection rate of 8%. The utilization rate of the round trip model is much higher with 92% utilization as compared to the one way model which has a utilization rate of 87%. Therefore, the round trip model is recommended to CommunAuto for managing its current fleet operations.