Abstract
Electric scooter rental companies such as Bird and Lime rely on gig workers to recharge their scooters. This paper discusses some of the limitations of the compensation schemes of these companies and the processes that these companies utilize to pick and deliver electric scooters. These limitations are discussed from the perspective of a gig worker. In the proposed approach, gig workers provide their schedule, capacity, and travel requirements to the app and the app then assigns the scooters (or delivery stations) to the gig workers. Two integer programming models, which minimize the overall effort necessary to collection and deliver scooters are presented. Numeric experiments that show the potential productivity gains from the proposed approach over the existing approach are presented. The main objective of this research is to present analytical methods that can be utilized to increase the productivity of the system, reduce the revenue uncertainty of gig workers, and thus make the job of a charger more attractive.
Highlights
There has been a great increase in the use of smart phone app based electric scooter rental companies (Bird, 2021; Lime, 2021; Spin, 2021) in the US cities and other parts of the world
Electric scooter rental companies such as Bird and Lime rely on gig workers to recharge their scooters
This paper discusses some of the limitations of the compensation schemes of these companies and the processes that these companies utilize to pick and deliver electric scooters
Summary
There has been a great increase in the use of smart phone app based electric scooter rental companies (Bird, 2021; Lime, 2021; Spin, 2021) in the US cities and other parts of the world. Bird, an electric scooter rental company, which was founded in year 2017, has reached more than 100 cities by the end of 2018 and received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding (Emerson, 2018) These electric scooters have potential to provide a great value to individuals, especially in urban areas, where pedestrian space is a big constraint. After a gig worker picks and charges a set of scooters, the app suggests the worker to select a space from a set of predesignated spaces to deliver (return) the charged scooters These spaces are called nest in the terminology of Bird company. Note that typically a worker can only claim one nest at a time, which guarantees that she will have space to leave her charged scooters (up to 3 scooters) at the end of her journey
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