A decision support system for the management of an electric-car sharing system

The deployment of the Electric Vehicles (EVs) in the fleets of Car Sharing (CS) systems represents a concrete opportunity to overcome the initial drawbacks associated to these new mobility solutions and so stimulate their diffusion. However, in order to make such a solution efficient and competitive with the traditional private transport, a detailed planning and an accurate management are required. With the aim of obtaining a tool able to support the management in facing these concerns, this paper presents the basic structure of a model based Decision Support System (DSS) to manage an electric-CS service. In particular, such a complex system is described as a Discrete Event model: the Unified Modeling Language formalism is used in order to represent the structure and the dynamics of a generic CS system. Moreover, a discrete-event simulator is developed and applied to an important CS management problem: the vehicle relocation problem. In particular, the performances of different vehicle relocation strategies in different operative scenarios are evaluated. © 2015 IEEE.