Das Projekt- und Medienarchiv der HdM

Beschreibung

As a user of the free-floating car-sharing service car2go, you might have experienced that there is not always a car available when you need one. But this not only happens to you: there are always idle cars at locations where no customer needs them and no cars where customers desperately need them. A reason for that is that demand and supply in shared mobility-systems is inherently imbalanced. A multitude of strategies is discussed to mitigate that problem: The most obvious is manual rebalancing, an approach that is very often used by bike-sharing programs. Here, people are driving around picking up idle vehicles to bring them into areas with high-demand. Another approach is dynamic pricing: incentives are offered to customers that bring cars from low- to high-demand areas. The technologically most advanced concept is certainly to use autonomous vehicles that are able to rebalance themselves - and maybe even perform other tasks on their way to the next customer. Unfortunately, the widespread application of such vehicles is still many years away. In the meantime, new approaches to increase the availability of vehicles can have positive effects on personal mobility and also on mobility problems in cities. In our project, we will combine two existing services to address this problem. Assuming that your trip cannot be solved in a better way via public transit, biking or walking, we will create a service that brings you to the closest car2go via a taxi-service. This increases the availability of car2go. The trip will be cheaper than a pure taxi trip but still more expensive than the original car2go-trip would have been–but maybe, we’ll find a solution for that as well. We will build an app that finds out which is the best car2go for your trip, calls a taxi cab for a trip to this car2go, reserves the car2go and supports the whole usage process. We will create a brand, and a website that explains the project and we will test the service with real customers and get their feedback to find out if there is room for improvement. We will investigate how much this service will cost compared to normal taxi- or car2go-trips, how much the customers are willing to pay for it and if there are revenue streams that might be helpful to reduce the total trip cost. We also try to find out more about the implications for the service providers: Are they benefiting from this service? Are they cannibalizing other services? Based on your experience, you will work on different aspects of the service and closely collaborate with your peers with different experiences. While groups of people will work more on the service concept and the deployment plan, other groups will work on the integration of APIs and the development of an app. The base-hypothesis is that not only the customer satisfaction can be increased due to increased availability, but that also the “disorder” of the system can be reduced with the help of such a system. There might also be new demand that has not been served so far. We will generate important insights on customer- and fleet behavior for the times when mobility-services using autonomous vehicles hit our roads.