Rental Profit Modeling And Decision-making Analysis For Electric Vehicle

Electric Vehicles(EV)have higher energy utilization rate and are more environmentally friendly than conventional vehicles and have received strong support from the government for promotion.However,consumers' concern about expensive purchase price and high maintenance cost are obstacles for EVs' sales application.EV rental can resolve its promotion difficult problem effectively.On one hand,it can reduce consumers' concern about purchasing an expensive and uncertain commodity by bearing high purchase and maintenance cost.On the other hand,it can help manufacturer bind service to manufacturing process and achieve more profit.Encouraging people to explore rental business mode has been included in the development program of energy-efficient and new energy vehicle made by the government.Subscription and mileage-based pricing are two of the main car/other vehicle leasing schemes and have been tried to be adopted by EV lessor.Making decisions to boost profit according to characteristics of EVs,rental service system and queueing features of customers is a challenging problem faced by EV lessor.Thus,building profit model and doing decision-making analysis for subscription and mileage-based pricing modes has important theoretical and practical implications.The main research contents are shown as follow.First,profit model of subscription and mileage-based pricing for EV rental service system is constructed based on queueing,vehicle maintenance cost and battery loss theory,by considering the bottleneck of consumers' arrival rate,the features of consumers deciding to choose service or not according to their perceived service value and characteristics of EVs.The profit model has made up for the deficiencies of related researches which neglect those points.Second,in the part of comparing profit of subscription and mileage-based pricing mode,mathematics analysis and graphic method will be used to analyze influences of parameters about EVs,rental service system and customer behavior on the differences of two pricing schemes' profits.The analyzing results can help EV lessor choose pricing scheme of higher profit as the operation mode.Then,in the part of maximizing profit of subscription pricing mode,in order to maximize profit,modified orthogonal experimental design(OED)method is used to solve the model.Firstly,optimized profit and the corresponding values of factors are obtained by conducting traditional OED method.Then,value intervals of factors to achieve optimal profit can be determined more precisely according to monotonicity of profit function on the optimal values of factors.Finally,more optimal results can be obtained by conducting OED method according to the new value intervals of factors while keeping the same number of value levels of each factor.An illustration example shows that the profit obtained by conducting modified OED method is more optimal,demonstrating effectiveness and practicability of the model.Next,in the part of maximizing profit of mileage-based pricing mode,to solve the complicated optimizing problem of maximizing profit of mileage-based pricing effectively,method of mathematical analysis was used to prove uniqueness of independent variable groups to achieve maximized profit.Genetic algorithm approach was applied to find maximized profit and the values of corresponding parameters,showing that model and profit maximization methods are feasible and effective.Finally,differential pricing strategies for subscription and mileage-based pricing scheme are proposed.Diversified combing rental schemes based on travel distance during fixed rental period,holding time under fixed travel distance,failure condition,usage extent and battery loss coefficient for EVs can be obtained.The illustration examples show that EV leasers can make more profits by differential pricing strategies than single subscription and mileage-based pricing,boosting lessors' profit and raising consumers' satisfaction level.