Inventory rebalancing and vehicle routing in bike sharing systems

J. Schuijbroek, R.C. Hampshire and W.-J. van Hoeve

European Journal of Operational Research, 2017, vol. 257, issue 3, 992-1004

Abstract: Bike sharing systems have been installed in many cities around the world and are increasing in popularity. A major operational cost driver in these systems is rebalancing the bikes over time such that the appropriate number of bikes and open docks are available to users. We combine two aspects that have previously been handled separately in the literature: determining service level requirements at each bike sharing station, and designing (near-)optimal vehicle routes to rebalance the inventory. Since finding provably optimal solutions is practically intractable, we propose a new cluster-first route-second heuristic, in which a polynomial-size Clustering Problem simultaneously considers the service level feasibility and approximate routing costs. Extensive computational results on real-world data from Hubway (Boston, MA) and Capital Bikeshare (Washington, DC) are provided, which show that our heuristic outperforms a pure mixed-integer programming formulation and a constraint programming approach.

Keywords: Bike sharing; Routing; Inventory; Integer programming; Constraint programming; Markov processes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (88)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221716306658
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ejores:v:257:y:2017:i:3:p:992-1004

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2016.08.029

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().