A car sharing auction with temporal-spatial OD connection conditions

:In this study, a tradable permit mechanism for a car sharing system was proposed. Car sharing services that allow users to move freely decrease the efficiency of sharing vehicle use due to the uneven distribution of vehicles and origin-destination (OD) demands. Thus, a tradable permit mechanism and a solution algorithm were proposed to solve this problem in this study. First, the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism for car sharing was proposed. This mechanism allowed the tradable permit system to achieve both strategy-proofness and efficient allocation. The difference between the case of single-minded bidders and that of multiple bidders was subsequently discussed. A single-minded bidder is defined as an agent that only bids on one item and a multiple bidder is defined as an agent that bids on more than one item. The results indicated that the permit price was decomposed into the usage fee for leaving the origin sharing station and the income for arriving at the destination sharing station. Additionally, the findings indicated that the negative price of using mobility sharing could occur when there was high asymmetric imbalanced OD demand. The negative price (that is benefit) could encourage the natural relocation of vehicles under the auction mechanism. The framework was then extended to treating a round trip case. Finally, a solution algorithm for these problems was proposed, and numerical examples were presented. The results demonstrated that the problem setting and the solution algorithm were feasible from the computational time viewpoint.