Distributed Stochastic Control of Incentive for Bike-Sharing Systems

Abstract

In the past decade, bike-sharing system has attracted significant attention as eco-friendly and healthy system of transportation. However, rebalancing the number of bicycles parked at port stations in networks is a serious challenge to provide comfortable service for users. One method to rebalance bicycles is by incentivizing users to rent/return their bicycles from/to appropriate port stations. In this paper, we first introduce a mathematical model to describe the dynamics of the number of parked bicycles, in which the behavior of incentivized users is stochastic. Then, we propose a distributed stochastic feedback-control law of the incentive, based on the idea of the quantized gossip algorithm to rebalance bicycles at all port stations in a network. We prove the convergence around the references in a probabilistic manner and discuss the results.