Repositioning Bikes with Carrier Vehicles and Bike Trailers in Bike Sharing Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel approach combining bike trailers and carrier vehicles to optimize bike redistribution in sharing systems, reducing demand loss and operational costs effectively.

Contribution

It introduces a joint method leveraging both bike trailers and carrier vehicles, which was not previously considered together in bike sharing system optimization.

Findings

Outperforms baseline methods in multiple datasets

Reduces demand loss effectively

Lowers operational costs

Abstract

Bike Sharing Systems (BSSs) have been adopted in many major cities of the world due to traffic congestion and carbon emissions. Although there have been approaches to exploiting either bike trailers via crowdsourcing or carrier vehicles to reposition bikes in the ``right'' stations in the ``right'' time, they do not jointly consider the usage of both bike trailers and carrier vehicles. In this paper, we aim to take advantage of both bike trailers and carrier vehicles to reduce the loss of demand with regard to the crowdsourcing of bike trailers and the fuel cost of carrier vehicles. In the experiment, we exhibit that our approach outperforms baselines in several datasets from bike sharing companies.