Optimization Approach to Station Location of Car Sharing System

In recent years vehicle sharing has developed rapidly because it can reduce traffic congestion and increase mobility. At present, China's carsharing enterprises are still in the development stage, and there exist problems like imbalance between supply and demand resulting from one-way carsharing service which allow customers to return cars at any station. In this paper, I develop and solve a MILP model for rental station location taking into vehicle relocation problem at the same time. And the optimization objective is minimizing the cost of system construction and the travel cost of users. The model is applied to a numerical sample, and the results provide useful insights regarding the efficient planning of one-way carsharing system and allow decision makers to quantify the trade-off between company's and user's cost.