Bike Sharing System’s Self-rebalance Problem Based On Queuing Theory

The bike sharing system is an important part of urban public transport.It can effectively connect different modes of transportation and plays an important role in short-distance trip.In bike sharing system,the uncertainty and complexity of demands leads to the uneven distribution of the number of bicycles at each station,which needs to be manually rebalanced.We believe that the bicycle rebalance process should not be limited to the use of dedicated trucks.Users can also participate in the rebalancing work to ease operators’ repositioning pressure and costs.The problem studied in this paper is to change the behavior of some users by recommending users to return his bike at stations that have fewer bicycles.And to realize the self-balancing of the public bicycle system and reduce the number of bicycles to be repositioned.We use queuing theory to study the recommended scheme and found that the probability of repositioning is the smallest when the actual arrival rate of the users that return bicycles and the arrival rate of the users that rent bicycles are the same.Based on this conclusion,we conducted simulation experiments on three scenarios: initial scheme with no recommendation,ideal recommended scheme with no considering of the distance factor and reasonable recommendation scheme that considering the distance factor.Finally,it is proved that the return of the user to the recommendation schemes can effectively reduce the number of the bicycles need to be repositioned.We have selected 30 stations with the largest amount of repositioning number under the initial scheme to conduct key analysis and found that the recommended scheme has more obvious effects on the stations with larger traffic.Moreover,when the distance that the user will accept the system’s recommendation is greater,the effect of the recommendation strategy is better.