Stackable vs Autonomous Cars for Shared Mobility Systems: a Preliminary Performance Evaluation

Car sharing is one of the key elements of aMobility-on-Demand system, but it still suffers from severalshortcomings, the most significant of which is the fleet unbalanceduring the day. What is typically observed in car sharingsystems, in fact, is a vehicle shortage in so-called hot spots (i.e.,areas with high demand) and vehicle accumulation in cold spots,due to the patterns in people flows during the day. In this work,we overview the main approaches to vehicle redistribution basedon the type of vehicles the car sharing fleet is composed of, andwe evaluate their performance using a realistic car sharingdemand derived for a suburban area around Lyon, France. Themain result of this paper is that stackable vehicles can achievea relocation performance close to that of autonomous vehicles,significantly improving over the no-relocation approach andover traditional relocation with standard cars.