Preliminary performance analysis of one-way car sharing system with a focus on opportunity loss

One-way carsharing is a new urban transport alternative allowing members to use the car from a fleet of vehicles for short periods. In carsharing system, the imbalanced vehicle distribution at stations by dynamic demands is a general problem, lowering the efficiency of the system. To evaluate the performance of carsharing system, this paper focuses on the opportunity loss of vehicle inventories at stations. A service level KPI is established to observe the full-car status, no-car status and no-battery status separately on stations. By conducting a real case study in Toyota, the result shows that the service level in different time periods at a station-level and cluster level. It shows that no-car status is the primary opportunity loss existing in Ha:mo carsharing system. Based on the clustering analysis of opportunity loss status, different suggestions are given to reduce the probability of potential demand in a cluster level. The result also provides a good basis for further system planning and deployment.