Tabu Search Algorithm for the Bike Sharing Rebalancing Problem

Abstract

Bike sharing is a new form of transport and is becoming increasingly popular in cities around the world. In this article, we deal with the Bike Sharing Rebalancing Problem (BRP) which concerns the task of repositioning bikes among stations in self-service bike-sharing systems. We analyze its property of routes' feasible changes based insertion positions, which allow us to speed up the computation of our heuristics. Based on the speed up technique, we proposed the Capacity Range Length Heuristic (CRLH), which is a kind of classic heuristics for the BRP, and the Tabu Search Algorithm (TSA) for solving the BRP. We evaluated our algorithms on the instance sets of other literature reported. The CRLH is strongly improved the computational times on same computational environment, and the TSA also find the optimal solutions but holds lower computational times comparing to the reported results in the literature.