Strategic design of public bicycle sharing systems incorporating with bicycle stocks considerations

This study addresses a strategic design problem for public bicycle sharing systems incorporating with bicycle stocks considerations. The key design decisions considered are: the number and locations of bicycle stations in the system, the creation of bicycle lanes between bicycle stations, the selection of paths of users between origins and destinations, and the inventory levels of sharing bicycles to be held at the bicycle stations. The design decisions are made with concerns for both total cost and service levels (measured both by availability rate for rental request at the pick-up rental stations and coverage of the origins and destinations). The optimal design of this system requires an integrated view of travel costs of users, bicycle inventory costs and facility costs of bicycle stations and bicycle lanes as well as service levels. The purpose of this study is to create a formal model that provides such an integrated view, and to develop methods for obtaining solutions for the design variables in practical situations. The complexity of the problem precludes exact solution of the optimization problem for instances of realistic size, so we propose a heuristic method for efficiently finding near-optimal solutions. Finally, a contrived example is created to illustrate the model.