Abstract
This paper proposes an incentive-based approach for rebalancing bike-sharing systems where customers are offered discount to pick up bikes from nearby stations that are expected to become full in the near future. The main contribution of this work is twofold: (1) we develop a customized station object in the Simio simulation software to facilitate modeling of bike-sharing systems and reduce the burden on the modeler by eliminating the need to code the basic functionalities of a bike station; and, (2) we develop a discrete event simulation model of a real-world bike-sharing system (CitiBike) using instances of the customized station object to evaluate the effectiveness of pickup incentives in rebalancing the system. The model is calibrated using historic data and the results confirm the effectiveness of such incentive-based rebalancing scheme. More specifically, the results suggest that while incentives help improve bike availability in general throughout the system (i.e., better balance and service), offering too many incentives can in fact reduce total profit due to decreased marginal profit per ride.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Citi Bike NYC. Citi Bike monthly operating reports, Citi Bike NYC. 2017. https://www.citibikenyc.com/system-data/operating-reports. Accessed 20 Oct 2017.
Schuijbroek J, Hampshire R, Van Hoeve W. Inventory rebalancing and vehicle routing in bike sharing systems. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University; 2013.
Dell’Olio L, Angel I, Moura JL. Implementing bike-sharing systems. Proc Inst Civ Eng Munic Eng Lond. 2011;164(2):89–101.
Martinez LM, Caetano L, Eiró T, Cruz F. An optimisation algorithm to establish the location of stations of a mixed fleet biking system: an application to the city of Lisbon. Procedia Soc Behav Sci. 2012;54:513–24.
Prem Kumar V, Bierlaire M. Optimizing locations for a vehicle sharing system. In: Proceedings of the Swiss transport research conference. 2012. p. 1–30.
Lin JR, Yang TH. Strategic design of public bicycle sharing systems with service level constraints. Transp Res Part E Logist Transp Rev. 2011;47(2):284–94.
Kaltenbrunner A, Meza R, Grivolla J, Codina J, Banchs R. Urban cycles and mobility patterns: exploring and predicting trends in a bicycle-based public transport system. Pervasive Mob Comput. 2010;6(4):455–66.
Vogel P, Mattfeld DC. Modeling of repositioning activities in bike-sharing systems. In: Proceedings of the world conference on transport research. 2010. p. 1–13.
Shu J, Chou MC, Liu Q, Teo C-P, Wang I-L. Models for effective deployment and redistribution of bicycles within public bicycle-sharing systems. Oper Res. 2013;61(6):1346–59.
Jian N, Freund D, Wiberg H, Henderson S. Simulation optimization for a large-scale bike-sharing system. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Winter simulation conference. IEEE; 2016. p. 602–13.
O’Mahony E, Shmoys DB. Data analysis and optimization for (citi)bike sharing. In: Proceedings of the twenty-ninth AAAI conference on artificial intelligence. 2015. p. 687–94.
Fricker C, Gast N. Incentives and redistribution in homogeneous bike-sharing systems with stations of finite capacity. Euro J Transp Logist. 2014;5(3):261–91.
Patel SJ. An incentive-based rebalancing scheme for large bike-sharing systems. Master’s paper. The Pennsylvania State University; 2017.
Smith J, Sturrock D, Kelton D. Simio and simulation: modeling, analysis, applications. Sewickley, PA: Simio LLC; 2017.
Ansari M, Negahban A, Megahed FM, Smith JS. HistoRIA: a new tool for simulation input analysis. In: Proceedings of the 2014 Winter simulation conference. IEEE; 2014. p. 2702–13.
Negahban A, Ansari M, Smith JS. ADD-MORE: automated dynamic display of measures of risk and error. In: Proceedings of the 2016 Winter simulation conference, IEEE; 2016. p. 977–88.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Patel, S.J., Qiu, R., Negahban, A. (2019). Incentive-Based Rebalancing of Bike-Sharing Systems. In: Yang, H., Qiu, R. (eds) Advances in Service Science. INFORMS-CSS 2018. Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04726-9_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04726-9_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04725-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04726-9
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)