Inventory rebalancing through pricing in public bike sharing systems

摘要

Public bike sharing systems are becoming popular in major cities throughout the world. Bikes provide an easy alternate transportation vehicle that help people manage their last mile problems in mobility. The major problem faced in bike sharing systems is repositioning of the bikes. Demand variability results in an imbalance in availability among stations. This affects operational costs and creates artificial shortage of bikes. Operating costs include system operations, administration, marketing and hardware-associated utility costs. System operation involves more expenditures as it involves maintenance, rebalancing, customer service operations and IT support. Rebalancing bikes from where there are many to where there is shortage can be expensive. This article proposes both exact and heuristic algorithms to reduce imbalance by introducing incentives/disincentives. Some imbalance stations are made intentionally more imbalanced to make them function as hubs so that with a few truck trips, redistribution can be done. This reduces both surplus accumulation as well as shortages. When the user tries to checkout, he will be given a choice to choose his destination and will be provided incentives based on the station. When higher incentives are provided for a station, more bikes will be available there and vice versa. It is assumed that the bike users exhibit homogeneous sensitivity to price. Also it is assumed that the travel demand is fixed and the user chooses the low price alternative. A bi-level optimization problem is developed and a heuristic algorithm called iterative price adjustment scheme (IPAS) is proposed for solving the problem. This approach can successfully reduce the number of imbalanced stations by providing bike users multiple journey choices and changing the cost of those journeys through pricing options. (23 refs.)