Profit optimization in one-way free float car sharing services: a user based relocation strategy relying on price differentiation and Urban Area Values

In the last years car-sharing has been growing as a valid alternative in urban mobility.Since its beginning the focus has been posed on relocation costs and stations positioning. On the counter part its well known that price discrimination can improve significantly companies' revenues. Our idea is to apply price discrimination to a particular case of car sharing by adapting tools from classical Revenue Management (e.g. airline models). We firstly propose a pricing strategy for car-sharing, and we propose a mixed-integer linear program to evaluate the best strategy. Furthermore we propose alternative MILP formulations corresponding to different relocation strategies. Finally we performs numerical simulation based on real data to support our approach.