CASSI: Design of a Simulation Environment for Vehicle Relocation in Carsharing

Simulations offer a cheap solution to get a comprehensive representation of operational service and to track the impact of changing systematic factors and business constraints. Carsharing services provide users with mobility services on demand. Although research has introduced strategies to optimize the setup and operation of such a system, they lack reusable and flexible simulation environments. For instance, carsharing research applies simulations to understand better and solve the problem of balancing vehicle supply and demand, which is essential to prevent operational inefficiencies and ensure customer satisfaction. Hence, testing new balancing mechanisms directly in a real-world environment is not feasible. As for now, researchers are implementing simulations from scratch again, which results in high development efforts and limited comparability of results. In this paper, we address this gap by designing a versatile, easy to use and to adapt, carsharing simulation tool. The tool simplifies the process of modelling a carsharing system and developing operation strategies. We furthermore propose a set of system performance measures, aiming to increase the comparability of developed solutions