Previous work

The members of this research team have an extensive experience in dealing with pricing, fleet management and mobility issues regarding car rental and car sharing systems, both academically and working with companies and public entities.

Car rental

This research team has been partly responsible for the advancement in the last years of the fleet management field in car rental. In Oliveira et al. (2017), a conceptual framework is proposed that integrates, systematizes and reviews the issues of fleet management as well as revenue management in the car rental business. A specific and relevant fleet management problem, the assignment of booking requests to available vehicles, was tackled in Oliveira et al. (2014), where the authors propose state-of-the-art algorithms to solve the problem within a realistic setting and time frame. The main motivation for these academic advancements was the case of a Portuguese car rental company with which part of this research team has been working in short/medium-term consultancy projects, namely on the design of a decision support system with dynamic pricing algorithms for the company's online sales channels (Oliveira et al., 2015). These experiences allowed to comprehend the inherent fleet and decision flexibility of this sector, thus providing the basis for integrating pricing and revenue management issues with fleet management.

Car sharing

Members of this research team have also previously worked on car sharing systems, namely regarding depot location (Correia and Antunes, 2012). In this work, one-way systems (i.e. where the user can pick-up the car in one location and leave it in a different location) were considered as well as different schemes to balance fleet and a case study in Lisbon (Portugal) were developed. In car sharing, one-way systems are expected to grow in the future and this is a relevant research direction. It is interesting to note that this ability to choose pick-up and drop-off location, common in car rental studies, brings the most challenging issues in fleet balancing and relocation. This has been studied in further detail in car rental and is an example of the synergies that can be established between the two mobility systems.

Main publications

  • Correia, G.H. de A., Antunes, A.P., 2012. Optimization approach to depot location and trip selection in one-way carsharing systems. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review 48, pp. 233-247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tre.2011.06.003
  • Oliveira, B.B., Carravilla, M.A., Oliveira, J.F., 2017. Fleet and revenue management in car rental companies: A literature review and an integrated conceptual framework. Omega 71, pp. 11-26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.omega.2016.08.011
  • Oliveira, B.B., Carravilla, M.A., Oliveira, J.F., Raicar, P., Acácio, D., Ferreira, J., Araújo, P., 2015. Pricing for internet sales channels in car rentals, Operations Research and Big Data: IO2015-XVII Congress of Portuguese Association of Operational Research (APDIO). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24154-8_17
  • Oliveira, B.B., Carravilla, M.A., Oliveira, J.F., Toledo, F.M.B., 2014. A relax-and-fix-based algorithm for the vehicle-reservation assignment problem in a car rental company. EuropeanJournal of Operational Research 237, pp. 729-737. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2014.02.018