Implementation of vehicle relocation for carsharing services in the multi-agent transport simulation MATSim

Operators of free-floating carsharing systems typically encounter the problem of imbalances in their vehicle fleets, caused by demand fluctuations over the course of one day, or from one day to the following. In order to provide a high level of accessibility to their service with a minimum number of vehicles, they must consider relocating unused vehicles. While some strategies to accomplish this have been successfully implemented, both in simulation and in practice, the set of tools required to represent carsharing in agent-based simulations is still incomplete. Agent-based simulations are particularly well suited to this task, because they allow modeling the interaction of supply and demand at individual level. This paper describes the implementation of the relocation agents within MATSim framework as an extension to the previous work on carsharing. The implementation was tested using a simple operator-based relocation strategy