Management of a pool of self-service cars

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of self-service cars arising in large companies where cars are at the employees' disposal to travel between different company sites. This problem also occurs in some big cities where electric cars are available for customers to make local journeys. The employee (or the customer) uses the car to travel from one site to another, and leaves it there so that other employees (or customers) can use it. This customer will use another car to travel to another site, if necessary. In this paper, we restrict ourselves to the case where the random variables which generate car requirements in a given site are independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables, and we study the behaviour of the system according to a balancing strategy.