Because electric vehicle sharing (EVS) offers the advantages of high flexibility and convenience, it has been receiving increasing attention worldwide as an effective approach to easing traffic congestion and environmental pollution. However, unbalanced electric vehicle distribution is an obstacle in the development of EVS. In this paper, we propose an integrated strategy to mitigate the imbalance issue and enhance customers’ adoption of EVS. We construct an integrated strategy that combines the price-incentive approach with the trip-selection policy and models uncertain travel demand in a continuous trip-adopting process based on our integrated strategy. Aiming to improve EVS operating profits, we apply spatiotemporal nonlinear mixed-integer programming to formulate the travel pricing and rebalancing plan. Additionally, we approximate the model in a tractable form after analyzing the optimal service adoption and develop an efficient exact algorithm to handle the nonlinear items. The computational results of a real-world car2go Amsterdam case study demonstrate several economic and environmental benefits generated by our integrated policy, including (i) higher profits for EVS operators, (ii) improved service satisfaction for consumers, and (iii) a higher level of carbon emissions reduction, from 381 grams per mile to 225 grams per mile, beneficial for the social environment. Moreover, according to the case study, an appropriate initial fleet size, high rebalancing frequency, low labor cost, high potential travel demands, and short charging time also benefit EVS operation.

Background:Teleconsultation plays an increasingly important role to solve the health care problem in rural areas around the world. Teleconsultation resource optimization has become a new research topic. Materials and Methods:Given the complex teleconsultation process was difficult to be described by mathematical methods, a queuing simulation model was developed based on the data and teleconsultation empirical flow of Henan Telemedicine Center of China (HTCC) and we used kernel density estimation to solve the problem of arrival rate and service rate of teleconsultation. The data obtained from HTCC included 21,295 teleconsultation records over a 1-year period (February 27, 2016–March 25, 2017). Results:The average waiting time (WT) that primary hospitals requested for teleconsultation was obtained by simulation and compared with empirical average WT to verify this model. We found that Department of Internal Medicine (DIM) WT was the highest and we searched the optimized combination of teleconsultation rooms and DIM experts by sensitivity analyses. Conclusions:The existing resource allocation was not optimal and the hospital managers can improve it to reduce the hospitals' operating costs and the patients' waiting costs. We suggested that the teleconsultation rooms needed at least four and the DIM experts could increase from three to four.

Towards booms on massive electric vehicle adoptions, vehicle-to-grid service creates significantly social-environmental benefits on acting as a flexible power resource alternative for stabilising the violent fluctuations and overload in the power grid. However, the customer's acceptance and unstable external environment degrade these positive influences on embracing V2G operations. Motivated by these practical challenges, we attempt to design a V2G power dispatching plan integrated with a revenue-sharing contract to coordinate the multi-parties interests in the power supply chain and further improve V2G service adoption. Specifically, we focus on an urban microgrid system, in which the aggregator integrates the supply chain coordination conditions of a revenue sharing contract into a V2G power dispatching plan. The nonlinear terms generated by the supply chain coordination conditions are approximated into a tractable convex form. Furthermore, by solving instances generated from real-world and synthetic data from CAR2GO in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, we demonstrate several implications: (1) the proposed contract integrated policy is proved cost-saving for the aggregator operation, revenue-improving for the EV user, and carbon footprint mitigation for the society; (2) our proposed policy facilitates the aggregator to balance the trade-off between revenue sharing ratio and operation cost; (3) based on our contract integrated policy, we also explore the influences of service rate.