Self-service bike sharing systems: simulation, repositioning, pricing

Self-service bike sharing systems experience often imbalance problems: in some stations there is a lack of bikes while in others there are too many bikes, leaving no empty rack for a user willing to park his bike. Imbalance problems can be partially settled by the actions of vehicles moving bikes during the night in order to prepare the forthcoming day. We speak then of static regulation, since bikes can be assumed to be not moving. These problems can also be partially countered by actions of the vehicles during the day. This is dynamic regulation and forms the topic of our present work. We build a precise theoretical framework for studying this dynamic problem and discuss the kind of impact vehicles moving bikes can have on the system. We prove moreover the inherent hardness of the dynamic regulation problem and present some ways to circumvent it by the use of heuristics. A pricing technique, not involving vehicles, is also proposed. An open-source and versatile simulator is also briefly described and used to compare the aforementioned methods.

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Source https://hal.science/hal-00824078
Author Chemla, Daniel, Meunier, Frédéric, Pradeau, Thomas, Wolfler Calvo, Roberto, Yahiaoui, Houssame
Maintainer CCSD
Last Updated May 11, 2026, 02:18 (UTC)
Created May 11, 2026, 02:18 (UTC)
Identifier hal-00824078
Language en
Rights https://about.hal.science/hal-authorisation-v1/
contributor Centre d'Enseignement et de Recherche en Mathématiques et Calcul Scientifique (CERMICS) ; École nationale des ponts et chaussées (ENPC)
creator Chemla, Daniel
date 2013-03-04T00:00:00
harvest_object_id 8b3aeedc-73c3-4076-95ac-b5dda93d6133
harvest_source_id 3374d638-d20b-4672-ba96-a23232d55657
harvest_source_title test moissonnage SELUNE
metadata_modified 2026-01-28T00:00:00
set_spec type:UNDEFINED