Upcoming paper: "Balancing Bicycle Sharing Systems: An Approach for the Dynamic Case"

[Christian Kloimüllner]

Dear all,

I want to announce a new publication on Bike Sharing Systems. Our group at the Vienna University of Technology has an upcoming paper (to appear in Springer LNCS Volume 8600) on the dynamic case of Balancing Bicycle Sharing Systems where we also consider user demands during rebalancing.

Abstract:

"Operators of public bicycle sharing systems (BSSs) have to regularly redistribute bikes across their stations in order to avoid them getting overly full or empty. We consider the dynamic case where this is done while the system is in use. There are two main objectives: On the one hand it is desirable to reach particular target fill levels at the end of the process so that the stations are likely to meet user demands for the upcoming day(s). On the other hand operators also want to prevent stations from running empty or full during the rebalancing process which would lead to unsatisfied customers. We extend our previous work on the static variant of the problem by introducing an efficient way to model the dynamic case as well as adapting our previous greedy and PILOT construction heuristic, variable neighborhood search and GRASP. Computational experiments are performed on instances based on real-world data from Citybike Wien, a BSS operator in Vienna, where the model for user demands is derived from historical data."

PDF-Link

If you have any questions do not hesitate to contact me (email address can be found in the paper).

Best regards,
Christian Kloimüllner.