Parking reservation policies in one-way vehicle sharing systems

• We examine parking reservation policies in one-way vehicle sharing systems.
• The total users excess time is used as the performance measure.
• We present a detailed user behavior model.
• We show analytically that reservations improve performance in most realistic systems.
• A discrete event simulation confirms the result for a realistic system.

In this study, we propose improving the performance of one-way vehicle sharing systems by incorporating parking reservation policies. In particular, we study a parking space reservation policy in which, upon rental, the users are required to state their destination and the system then reserves a parking space for them until they arrive at their destinations. We measure the performance of the vehicle sharing system by the total excess time users spend in the system. The excess time is defined as the difference between the actual journey time and the shortest possible travel time from the desired origin to the desired destination. A Markovian model of the system is formulated. Using this model, we prove that under realistic demand rates, this policy improves the performance of the system. This result is confirmed via a simulation study of a large real system, Tel-O-Fun, the bike-sharing system in Tel-Aviv. For all the tested demand scenarios, the parking reservation policy reduces the total excess time users spend in the system, with a relative reduction varying between 14% and 34%. Through the simulation we examine additional service-oriented performance measures and demonstrate that they all improve under the parking reservation policy.