A framework for a vehicle sharing system

The vehicle sharing systems (VSSs) are becoming more and more popular due to both financial and environmental effects. On the other hand, they face many challenges, such as inventory management of the vehicles and parking spots, imbalance of the vehicles, determining pricing strategies, and demand forecasting. If these are not addressed properly, the system experiences a significant loss of customers and therefore revenue. The existing studies address many VSS related problems, however, they do not discuss the effects of the results to the other components of the system. This work provides a framework for VSS management from a wider perspective by addressing the components and their relations with the inclusion of a time dimension. The proposed framework is aimed to be applicable for any kind of VSS. After identifying as many problems as possible related to a VSS, the future work will focus on the application of the framework to a light electric vehicle (LEV) sharing system.