Regulating vehicle sharing systems through parking reservation policies: Analysis and performance bounds

•The exertion of parking reservation policies in vehicle sharing systems is studied.•Partial parking reservations are introduced and analyzed.•Mathematical programming based lower bounds on the quality of service are devised.•The complete parking reservation policy is shown to be both simple and effective.•Parking overbooking policies are demonstrated not to be worthwhile.

We study the regulation of one-way station-based vehicle sharing systems through parking reservation policies. We measure the performance of these systems in terms of the total excess travel time of all users caused as a result of vehicle or parking space shortages. We devise mathematical programming based bounds on the total excess travel time of vehicle sharing systems under any passive regulation (i.e., policies that do not involve active vehicle relocation) and, in particular, under any parking space reservation policy. These bounds are compared to the performance of several partial parking reservation policies, a parking space overbooking policy and to the complete parking reservation (CPR) and no-reservation (NR) policies introduced in a previous paper. A detailed user behavior model for each policy is presented, and a discrete event simulation is used to evaluate the performance of the system under various settings. The analysis of two case studies of real-world systems shows the following: (1) a significant improvement of what can theoretically be achieved is obtained via the CPR policy; (2) the performances of the proposed partial reservation policies monotonically improve as more reservations are required; and (3) parking space overbooking is not likely to be beneficial. In conclusion, our results reinforce the effectiveness of the CPR policy and suggest that parking space reservations should be used in practice, even if only a small share of users are required to place reservations.