On Carsharing Platforms with Electric Vehicles as Energy Service Providers

Abstract

This paper presents a queuing-theoretic framework to analyze the business of business-to-customer carsharing services with electric vehicle (EV) fleets. When grid-connected, EVs can use their batteries for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) interactions. In this work, we allow a carsharing platform to conceptually split its EV batteries into two parts: one part to provide transportation to carsharing customers and another for energy trading. We characterize the optimal storage control policy for price arbitrage during transportation-idle times and leverage equilibrium analysis of  M/G/N/N  queues with  N  cars to calculate the platform’s average revenue rate from dual service provision. For the single-EV case, we explicitly characterize the optimal price, both with patient and impatient customers. For the general  N -car case, we provide an algorithm to maximize revenue rate over price and battery split, and utilize the algorithm to numerically study the variation of the optimal solutions with problem parameters.

Keywords: Electric carsharing, Queuing model