Authors: Elvezia M. Cepolina, Alessandro Farina
The paper concerns a capillar third generation car sharing system for urban pedestrian environments. The following specific services are provided instant access, open ended reservation and one way trips; vehicles can be accessed not only at stations, but also along the roads. All these features provide users with high flexibility, but create a problem of uneven distribution of vehicles. Therefore, relocations of vehicles must be performed. Different relocation procedures exist in literature. In this paper, a management scheme is proposed where vehicles automatically relocate and reach the users positions, thanks to their degree of automation. In order to provide transport managers with a useful tool to test the proposed system in different realities, an object-oriented simulator has been developed. An optimization algorithm has also been developed for assessing the fleet dimension and the transport system parameters. The proposed car sharing system has been simulated for Genoa historical city centre, Italy.