Active fleet balancing in vehicle sharing systems via Feedback Dynamic Pricing

In the last few years, many Vehicle Sharing Systems (VSSs) have been widely promoted around the world as a sustainable urban transport paradigm. Such systems can be divided in two main categories: one-way VSSs and round-trip VSSs. This paper focuses on the issue of keeping the number of vehicles balanced over the stations in one-way VSSs. Specifically, the paper presents a novel approach called Feedback Dynamic Pricing (FDP), based on the modelling of a VSS as a dynamical system and aimed to control the fleet balancing by varying the price of the service in real-time. To show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a full-fledged simulator has been developed taking into account the stochastic nature of human decisions. The results obtained using controlled and uncontrolled VSSs are finally compared and discussed.