Simulation-based estimation of the real demand in bike-sharing systems in the presence of censoring

Ashkan Negahban

European Journal of Operational Research, 2019, vol. 277, issue 1, 317-332

Abstract: Data on successful bike pickups/drop-offs censor the demand from customers/riders that were unable to pickup/drop-off a bike due to bike/dock unavailability (i.e., balks). The objective of this paper is two-fold: (1) provide a formal comparison between the distribution of satisfied bike/dock demand and the true (latent) demand in bike-sharing systems through simulation experiments and nonparametric bootstrap tests to show when and how the two may differ; and, (2) propose a novel methodology combining simulation, bootstrapping, and subset selection that harnesses the useful partial information in every bike pickup/drop-off observation (even if it is subject to censoring) to estimate the true demand in situations where data filtering/cleaning approaches commonly used in the bike-sharing literature fail due to lack of valid data. The results reveal that the distribution of inter-pickup/drop-off times may differ (statistically) from the distribution of the actual inter-arrival time of customers/bikes primarily for higher percentile values and even if the demand rate is slower than the supply rate, especially if customer/bike inter-arrival times follow a heavy-tailed distribution. The statistical power of the proposed demand estimation approach in identifying an appropriate model for the underlying demand distribution is tested through simulation experiments as well as a real-world application. The paper has important academic and practical impacts by providing additional means to obtain and use statistically valid demand estimates, enhancing decision-making related to the design and operation of bike-sharing systems.

Keywords: Simulation; Bike-share programs; Simulation-based inference; Bootstrapping; Ranking and selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221719301419
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:277:y:2019:i:1:p:317-332

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2019.02.013

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 ().