A Data-Driven Optimization Framework for Static Rebalancing Operations in Bike Sharing Systems

Junming Liu (), Weiwei Chen () and Leilei Sun ()
Additional contact information
Junming Liu: Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR
Weiwei Chen: Department of Supply Chain Management, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 07102
Leilei Sun: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China

INFORMS Journal on Computing, 2025, vol. 37, issue 5, 1369-1390

Abstract: Bike sharing systems have been widely deployed in urban cities for first- and last-mile transportation. However, because of the geographical and temporal imbalance of bike demand, bikes need to be reallocated system-wide among stations during the night to maintain a high service level while minimizing demand loss due to stockout or overcapacity. Two technical challenges remain in optimizing the static bike rebalancing operations. One challenge is to accurately predict bike pickup and dropoff demand at each station, considering demand substitution effects and subsequently determining the optimal rebalancing quantity for each station. The other is to efficiently optimize the routing of multiple rebalancing vehicles for large-scale bike sharing systems, considering outlier stations with rebalancing quantities exceeding vehicle capacity. To this end, we propose an end-to-end solution to tackle the aforesaid challenges. Specifically, we first develop deep learning-based predictors that capture the time dependencies of station-level demand, the impact of weather conditions, and the demand substitution effect by nearby stations. Based on the demand rate, a sequential simulation-based demand loss estimator is developed to find the optimal rebalancing quantities that lead to the minimum expected demand loss. Then, a mixed integer linear programming model is formulated to optimize the routing problem of rebalancing vehicles. To address the computational challenge, we propose a data-driven decomposition algorithm to support a multivehicle multivisit rebalancing strategy by decomposing the multivehicle routing problem into smaller and tractable single-vehicle routing problems, which can be solved in parallel. Finally, extensive numerical experiments using real-world data from New York City Citi Bike demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed bike demand predictors, the impact of demand substitution, and the efficiency of the data-driven optimization framework.

Keywords: bike sharing; nonlinear autoregressive; rebalancing operations; demand substitution (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/ijoc.2022.0182 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orijoc:v:37:y:2025:i:5:p:1369-1390

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in INFORMS Journal on Computing from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().