System-Control-Based Approach to Car-Sharing Systems

In recent years, car-sharing services have become a form of mobility-as-a-service (MaaS). These services and their demand are likely to increase owing to their high convenience to users. Nevertheless, the current one-way car-sharing service raises significant challenges to the operator, the most pertinent of which is the uneven distribution of vehicles. A straightforward solution for this problem is the relocation or rebalancing of vehicles by the operator; however, reducing the labor cost of vehicle relocation is a difficult optimization problem, which has attracted considerable research attention. The present study addresses this issue by applying system control approaches, including dynamic pricing, to common decentralized policy, sparse optimal control, a consensus-based primal-dual method with event-triggered communication, optimal control of probability distribution, and a DC program. This chapter reports on the study illustrating that system control approaches are promising for mobility innovation.