Author(s)

E. M. Cepolina, M. Bonfanti & A. Farina

Abstract

The paper concerns the conceptual design of a new car-sharing system for historical city centres and the simulation of the system for the historical city centre of Genoa. The application fields of the system are historical city centres characterised by narrow streets and interactions with high pedestrian flows. The proposed transport system is based on a fleet of Personal Intelligent City Accessible Vehicles (PICAV). The following specific services are provided: instant access, open ended reservation and one way trips. Vehicles can be accessed and returned only at parking lots. These parking lots are placed in locations on the historical city centre border close to interchange points with public transportation. PICAV users are generated at these parking lots during the simulation. We assume the existence of a system supervisor who is in charge of addressing at least part of the PICAV users to specific parking lots. The supervisor, according with: the current waiting times at parking lots; the number of PICAV units available in each parking lot; the choice set Di of user i; assigns a parking lot to the user that has to be reasonable from both the point of view of the flexible user and of the fleet manager. An object-oriented simulator has been developed. Given an area, the localization of the PICAV parking lots, the fleet of PICAV units at each parking lot at the beginning of the simulation time and the PICAV transport demand, the simulator is able to provide the distribution of waiting times at each parking lot. This result enables us to dimension the fleet in order to have a given percentile of the distribution of user waiting times less than a given threshold. Keywords: car sharing transport system, user based relocation, object-oriented micro simulation.

Keywords

Keywords: car sharing transport system, user based relocation, object-orientedmicro simulation.