A bike sharing system simulator

Abstract

Bike-sharing systems are becoming very popular in big cities. They provide a cheap and green mean of transportation used for commuting and leisure. Being a shared limited resource, it is common to reach imbalanced situations where some stations have either no bikes or only empty slots, thus decreasing the performance of the system. To solve such situations, trucks are typically used to move bikes among stations in order to reach a more homogeneous distribution. Recently, research works are focusing on a complementary action to reduce imbalances consisting in incentivizing users to take (or return) bikes from stations with many bikes rather than those with few bikes, e.g. by fare discounts. In this paper, we present simulator for analyzing bike-sharing systems. Several user generation distributions can be configured. The simulator is specifically designed with the aim of evaluating incentive-based rebalancing strategies. The paper describes in detail the characteristics and potential of the simulator, including several experiments.