Competitive Location and Size Problem for the New-Coming Operator in One-Way Carsharing Systems

Shared cars provide an alternative service for traveling, which has attracted extensive attention from the operators. To this end, this study addresses the competitive location and size problem for car-sharing operators. A bi-level linear programming model is developed to optimize the location and size of stations for the new-coming operator under the condition that a car-sharing operator exists already. In the upper-level model, all operators’ total demands satisfied are maximized. In the lower-level model, all travelers’ costs are minimized by choosing one of the car-sharing operators. The logit model is applied to describe this kind of behavior of travelers. The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions and big-M method are jointly used to transform the bi-level model into a single-level linear programming model, and then it can be solved by CPLEX directly. Results indicate that the new-coming operator can occupy a certain market share by setting a lower price.