Abstract
It has been supposed that the redistribution of empty vehicles is essential in the operation of a city car system lest the service level of the system should go down because of the random arrival of passengers at each station.
This paper deals with the simulation study on the effects of redistribution of empty vehicles on improving the service level of the system under random passenger arrival. For the simulation model, a city car system with 15 stations is assumed and the passenger arrival rate and the time distance between any two of the stations are set to be constant, and also a Poisson passenger arrival is assumed at each station.
At the first stage, the simulation without redistribution is executed to show conclusively that the service level of the system goes down owing to the random passenger arrival. The simulations with a redistribution process of several redistribution capacities are executed at the next stage. As the results of the simulation study it is pointed out that the appropriate redistribution process should be introduced in order to keep the operation of the system stationary and to have some satisfactory service level of the system under random passenger arrival. Also, as the effect of redistribution is related to the total number of the vehicles in the system, the redistribution capacity should be decided according to the total number of the vehicles in the system.
