Balancing public bicycle sharing system by defining response rates for destinations

Public Bicycle Sharing System (PBSS) is used as a way to reduce traffic and pollution in cities. Its performance is related to availability of bicycles for picking up and free docks to return them. Existence of different demand types leads to the emergence of imbalanced stations. Here, we try to balance inventory of stations via defining maximal response rates for each type of rental request. If the maximal response rate for a destination is lower than 100 percent, a part of the proposed destination requests is rejected in the hope of balancing the inventory. The goal is to minimize the mean extra inventory and the mean rejected requests by providing proper amounts of the maximal response rates. An approximation method named as Mean Value Analysis (MVA) is used to develop a genetic algorithm for solving the problem. Different examples are worked through to examine the applicability of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed policy leads to a significant improvement and reduces the users’ dissatisfaction.