What is it about?
We develop practical operations research models to support decision making (e.g., how many bicycles to be deployed at where and when) in the design and management of public bicycle-sharing systems.
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Why is it important?
We develop a network flow model with proportionality constraints to estimate the flow of bicycles within the network and the number of trips supported, given an initial allocation of bicycles at each station. We use a deterministic LP model to approximate the system performance of the stochastic system, and show that the deterministic model can imitate the actual system performance very closely, based on actual Singapore MRT ridership data.needed.
Perspectives
This research was firstly started in 2008 based on my research experiences in dealing with the location problem for installing bicycle stations and dynamic repositioning problem for the YouBike at Taipei and C-bike at Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The OD MRT transit data of Singapore helps to resolve the problem of trustful biking OD demands that are usually difficult to be estimated. Our proposed proportional constraints also play a key role to mimic the traffic flows in a more reasonable way (o.w., most literature only cares about flow balance, which tends to "control the riding behavior of riders" without considering their original riding patterns. Unfortunately, the proportional constraints can not be used in conjunction with the consideration of station capacity, since it will lead to nonlinear constraints in the mathematical models.
Professor I-Lin Wang
National Cheng Kuing University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Models for Effective Deployment and Redistribution of Bicycles Within Public Bicycle-Sharing Systems, Operations Research, December 2013, INFORMS,
DOI: 10.1287/opre.2013.1215.
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