Analysis of the first-come-first-served mechanisms in car-sharing services

Abstract

Car-sharing services (CSS) have recently drawn increasing attention. As widely used in CSS, the firstcome-first-served (FCFS) principle specifies that travelers arriving first should be served first for the sake of equity. This study formulates four different FCFS mechanisms in a multi-modal supernetwork. For each variant, we formulate the supply-demand dynamics of CSS and the generalized costs of using CSS. A boundedly rational dynamic traffic assignment model is formulated as a variational inequalities (VI) problem to study the effects of the FCFS mechanisms. Numerical examples on two FCFS mechanisms demonstrate different supply-demand dynamics.