The vehicle relocation problem with operation teams in one-way carsharing systems

Abstract

The imbalance of available vehicles at different stations is an outstanding challenge in one-way carsharing systems. Dedicated to this issue, the operation teams in one company in Shanghai, China, each of which contains several workers, take operation vehicles to rebalance sharing vehicles among stations. A pertinent optimization problem, called the vehicle relocation problem with operation teams, is encountered in practice to find the relocation pairs of stations and the visiting routes of operation vehicles. In this paper, a mathematical programming model for minimizing the sum of relocation distance of sharing vehicles and travel distance of operation vehicles is constructed. An adaptive large neighbourhood search algorithm with several problem-specific algorithmic components is developed to efficiently solve the problem. Computational results validate the competitive performance of the proposed approach by comparing it with the commercial optimization software and a sequential approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Transportation
• metaheuristics
• carsharing
• vehicle relocation
• vehicle rebalancing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 71801058, 71602081  ]; Guangxi Natural Science Foundation [grant number 2018GXNSFBA281104]; Guangxi Science and Technology Project [grant number AD191101532018AD19260 ].

Notes on contributors

Yuwei Lu

Yuwei Lu received the Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2018. She is currently an associate professor and the vice director of department Mechanical Engineering in the School of Mechanical and Transportation Engineering, Guangxi University of Science and Technology, Liuzhou, 545006, China. She is also currently engaged in Post-doctoral research in SAIC-GM-Wuling Automobile Co., Ltd. Her research has been published in the European Journal of Production Research, International Journal of Production Research, etc. Her research interests lie in optimization, including appointment scheduling and vehicle routing in healthcare and intelligent manufacturing in automobile.

Kangzhou Wang

Kangzhou Wang received the Ph.D. degree in Management Science and Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2014. He is currently the Professor with School of Management, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China. His research has been published in the Production and Operations Management, International Journal of Production Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Transportation Research Part D, etc. His research interests include service-oriented manufacturing, shared manufacturing, cloud manufacturing and logistics.

Biao Yuan

Biao Yuan received the Ph.D. degree in industrial engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2018. He worked as an algorithm engineer in the SAIC Motor Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai, and SAIC Intelligent Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd, Shanghai from 2018 to 2020. He is currently an algorithm expert in Cainiao Network. His research has been published in the Computers & Operations Research, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, International Journal of Production Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, etc. His research interests lie in the development of solution approaches for optimization problems in logistics, including problems related to vehicle routing and healthcare logistics.