Bike-Sharing Fleet Allocation Optimization Based on Demand Gap and Cycle Rebalancing Strategies

Abstract

In Bike-Sharing System (BSS), the initial number of bikes at station will affect the time interval and the amount of rebalancing, which is usually empirically determined and does not reflect the characteristics of consumer demand in finer time granularity, thus possibly leading to biased conclusions. In this paper, a fleet allocation method considering demand gap is first proposed to calculate the initial number of bikes at each station. Then, taking the number of demand gap periods as the decision variable, an optimization model is built to minimize the total rebalancing amount. Furthermore, the research periods are divided into multiple subcycles, the single-cycle and multicycle rebalancing strategies are presented, and the additional subcycle rebalancing method is introduced to amend the number of bikes between subcycles to decrease the rebalancing amount of the next subcycle. Finally, our methods are verified in effectively decreasing the rebalancing amount in a long-term rebalancing problem.