A Multiperiodic Optimization Formulation for the Operation Planning of Free-Floating Shared Bike in China

Abstract

Internet shared bike has trigged a revolution on the public bicycle utilization in China for various characteristics such as free-floating, intelligent unlocking, mobile payment, intelligent integration, and optional serving. It attracts many users and meanwhile accumulates the development of short-distance alternative trip. This paper has designed an optimization model for the deployment and travel of free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) among small regions. For a given demand under the constraint of overload of flexile stations, the model makes a decision on the minimum number of bike deployments in the system and the planning of bike movement between stations at different time periods. It maximizes the profit of operators during the whole planning horizon and meanwhile satisfices the demand and minimizes the overload situation of stations. The proposed approach is verified with numerical example, aiming to help operators to program and manage systems in a more efficient way.