Abstract
Shared bikes have become popular traveling tools in our daily life. The successful operation of bike sharing systems (BSS) can greatly promote energy saving in a city. In BSS, stations becoming empty or full is the main cause of customers failing to rent or return bikes. Some truck-based rebalancing strategies are proposed to solve this problem. However, there are still challenges around the relocation of bikes. The truck operating costs also need to be considered. In this paper, we propose a customer-oriented rebalancing strategy to solve this problem. In our strategy, two algorithms are proposed to ensure the whole system is balanced for as long as possible. The first algorithm calculates the optimal state of each station through the one-dimensional Random Walk Process with two absorption walls. Based on the derived optimal state of each station, the second algorithm recommends the station that has the largest difference between its current state and its optimal state to the customer. In addition, a simulation system of shared bikes based on the historical records of Bay Area Bikeshare is built to evaluate the performance of our proposed rebalancing strategy. The simulation results indicate that the proposed strategy is able to effectively decrease the imbalance in the system and increase the system’s performance compared with the truck-based methods.
Highlights
Energy saving is a vital task for the sustainable development of a city [1]
In order to validate the proposed strategy, we compared it with three scenarios: the system with no rebalancing, the static rebalancing strategy and the dynamic rebalancing strategy
No Rebalancing (NR): We operate the system without any intervention, even if there appears full or empty stations
Summary
Energy saving is a vital task for the sustainable development of a city [1]. The government attaches great importance to the development of bike sharing systems (BSS), since they can greatly help reduce urban energy consumption [2,3]. We think the essential condition for the successful operation of BSS is solving the imbalance problem. In BSS, the imbalance problem means some stations are empty (there are no available bikes for renting) while some stations are full (there are no empty docks for returning). A customer will experience an unsatisfactory service when there are no available bikes or docks at a station. Improving customer satisfaction is one of the tasks for BSS operators
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