Incentivizing the Use of Bike Trailers for Dynamic Repositioning in Bike Sharing Systems

Bike Sharing System (BSS) is a green mode of transportation that is employed extensively for short distance travels in major cities of the world. Unfortunately, the users behaviour driven by their personal needs can often result in empty or full base stations, thereby resulting in loss of customer demand. To counter this loss in customer demand, BSS operators typically utilize a fleet of carrier vehicles for repositioning the bikes between stations. However, this fuel burning mode of repositioning incurs a significant amount of routing, labor cost and further increases carbon emissions. Therefore, we propose a potentially self-sustaining and environment friendly system of dynamic repositioning, that moves idle bikes during the day with the help of bike trailers. A bike trailer is an add-on to a bike that can help with carrying 3-5 bikes at once. Specifically, we make the following key contributions: (i) We provide an optimization formulation that generates “repositioning” tasks so as to minimize the expected lost demand over past demand scenarios; (ii) Within the budget constraints of the operator, we then design a mechanism to crowdsource the tasks among potential users who intend to execute repositioning tasks; (iii) Finally, we provide extensive results on a wide range of demand scenarios from a real-world data set to demonstrate that our approach is highly competitive to the existing fuel burning mode of repositioning while being green.