A Metaheuristic Method to Design One-Way Electric Car Sharing System

Electric car sharing systems provide users with short-term access to a variety of shared electric vehicles, with payments linked to usage. It is an innovative transport strategy that enables users to find the adequate type of electric vehicle according to their needs and only when required. The configuration of these systems has a major impact on the attractiveness of the car sharing operators, hence, their revenues and their ability of serving as many customers as possible. This configuration consists of several parameters such as the location and capacity of stations for recharging and parking electric cars, the number and types of electric cars, as well as their battery capacities. In this paper, we investigate how to design an efficient one-way electric car sharing system. The aim is to select a set of locations, from a set of possibilities, to establish the stations and to determine the initial number of electric cars at each station. Our main contribution is a ruin and recreate neighborhood heuristic that we propose to generate new solutions. We evaluated our heuristic on scenario data from Manhattan, USA.