A Unified Framework for Analyzing Closed Queueing Networks in Bike Sharing Systems

Abstract

During the last decade bike sharing systems have emerged as a public transport mode in urban short trips in more than 500 major cities around the world. For the mobility service mode, many challenges from its operations are not well addressed yet, for example, how to develop bike sharing systems to be able to effectively satisfy the fluctuating demands both for bikes and for vacant lockers. To this end, it is key to conduct performance analysis of bike sharing systems. This paper first describes a large-scale bike sharing system. Then the bike sharing system is abstracted as a closed queueing network with multi-class customers, where the virtual customers and the virtual nodes are set up, and the service rates as well as the relative arrival rates are established. Finally, this paper gives a product-form solution to the steady state joint probabilities of queue lengths, and provides a performance analysis of the bike sharing system. Therefore, this paper provides a unified framework for analyzing closed queueing networks in the study of bike sharing systems. We hope that the methodology and results of this paper can be applicable in the study of more general bike sharing systems.