INTEGRATED OPERATIONAL AND FINANCIAL CONTROL OF CAR-SHARING FLEETS UTILIZATION, PRICING, AND VEHICLE HEALTH
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Loginov Igor Dmitrievich
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Car-sharing operators control three levers that jointly determine per-vehicle profitability: where vehicles are positioned, what price a trip carries, and whether a vehicle is mechanically fit to accept a booking. Operations research treats these three levers as separate problems, each with its own optimization literature and its own validated results. This review synthesizes findings on fleet allocation, dynamic pricing, and vehicle health monitoring in car-sharing operations, and examines two practitioner proposals that attempt to unify all three within a single computational and financial control architecture. Peer-reviewed studies calibrated against Zipcar and car2go data report utilization gains of 12 to 28 percentage points and pricing gains of 15 to 30 percent when relocation and pricing are optimized jointly; one peer-reviewed study extends this joint optimization to include vehicle charging state, the closest existing precedent for treating utilization, pricing, and a vehicle-condition variable within one control policy. No peer-reviewed model reviewed here extends that integration to mechanical health monitoring or to financial cost accounting. Two practitioner sources propose this extension: a diagnostic framework identifying fleet underutilization, static pricing, damage-related revenue leakage, and depreciation misaccounting as four linked deficiencies, and a computational architecture combining a Fleet Health Index, mixed-integer allocation, demand forecasting, and adaptive pricing into one operating system. Their reported benchmarks have not been independently tested against data the authors did not collect, a gap this review treats as a specific and correctable limitation. It is not a reason to dismiss the underlying architecture.
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Authors
Loginov Igor Dmitrievich
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