Smart lock for bike sharing in corporate environments

摘要

Bike sharing systems facilitate and promote biking as a public transportation alternative, providing benefits to the health and the environment. Contemporary bike sharing systems are automated and robust, but still have drawbacks. These are, for example, dependence on immovable stations with limited capacity and availability of service, only present in selected cities. Moreover, currently there are no solutions for automated bike sharing for private and corporate use.In this thesis, we introduce a bike sharing system designed as a service for company employees. This system allows using the bikes for short trips or commuting. The focus of the thesis is on creating a smart bike lock, which is a device that enables automated bike access management. Currently, there are no smart bike locks available commercially off-the-shelf. However with our bike management system, relying on a custom-made smart bike lock, the companies can offer their employees shared bikes with minimal management effort.The system has been tested in a controlled environment, and the device has been evaluated. The results are positive: the device fulfils the core requirements of the system and can be used as part of the service. The current smart bike lock is still a prototype. Further work is necessary to improve the design and add features such as short range wireless.