Integrating Resource Management in Service Network Design for Bike-Sharing Systems

Station-based bike-sharing systems rely on bike redistribution to provide users with an adequate service level. We propose a novel formulation of service network design that coordinates redistribution decisions in space and time to plan regular master tours. This formulation explicitly integrates resource-management decisions by considering a limited redistribution budget to acquire and operate vehicles, as well as an accurate time representation of pickups and deliveries of bikes at stations. We propose a matheuristic relying on a neighborhood search scheme to find solutions of good quality for real-world-sized problem instances in reasonable time. To produce starting solutions, we propose a construction heuristic decomposing the daytime redistribution process into three sequential phases: determine pickups and deliveries, link pickups and deliveries into transport requests, and assign transport requests to master tours. We evaluate the operational performance of master tours with a discrete-event simulation approach. We show that master tours improve the level of service in bike-sharing systems with high and regular mobility patterns, for example, commuting activities.