A two-phase optimization method for a multiobjective vehicle relocation problem in electric carsharing systems

The paper focuses on one-way electric carsharing systems, where the fleet of cars is made up of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and the users can pick-up the EV at a station and return it to a different one. Such systems require efficient vehicle relocation for constantly balancing the availability of EVs among stations. In this work, the EVs are relocated by workers, and the issue of finding a trade-off among the customers’ satisfaction, the workers’ workload balance and the carsharing provider’s objective is addressed. This leads to a three-objective optimization problem for which a two-phase solution approach is proposed. In the first phase, feasible routes and schedules for relocating EVs are generated by different randomized search heuristics; in the second phase, non-dominated solutions are found through epsilon-constraint programming. Computational results are performed on benchmark instances and new large size instances based on the city of Milan.