Abstract
We consider the necessary redistribution of bicycles in public bicycle sharing systems in order to avoid rental stations to run empty or entirely full. For this purpose we propose a general Variable Neighborhood Search (VNS) with an embedded Variable Neighborhood Descent (VND) that exploits a series of neighborhood structures. While this metaheuristic generates candidate routes for vehicles to visit unbalanced rental stations, the numbers of bikes to be loaded or unloaded at each stop are efficiently derived by one of three alternative methods based on a greedy heuristic, a maximum flow calculation, and linear programming, respectively. Tests are performed on instances derived from real-world data and indicate that the VNS based on a greedy heuristic represents the best compromise for practice. In general the VNS yields good solutions and scales much better to larger instances than two mixed integer programming approaches.
This work is supported by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), contract 831740.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Chemla, D., Meunier, F., Calvo, R.W.: Bike sharing systems: Solving the static rebalancing problem. To appear in Discrete Optimization (2012)
Raviv, T., Tzur, M., Forma, I.A.: Static Repositioning in a Bike-Sharing System: Models and Solution Approaches. To appear in EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics (2012)
Benchimol, M., Benchimol, P., Chappert, B., De la Taille, A., Laroche, F., Meunier, F., Robinet, L.: Balancing the stations of a self service bike hire system. RAIRO – Operations Research 45(1), 37–61 (2011)
Contardo, C., Morency, C., Rousseau, L.M.: Balancing a Dynamic Public Bike-Sharing System. Technical Report CIRRELT-2012-09, CIRRELT, Montreal, Canada (2012), submitted to Transportation Science
Mladenović, N., Hansen, P.: Variable neighborhood search. Computers and Operations Research 24(11), 1097–1100 (1997)
Cherkassky, B.V., Goldberg, A.V.: On implementing the push-relabel method for the maximum flow problem. Algorithmica 19(4), 390–410 (1997)
Pirkwieser, S., Raidl, G.R.: A variable neighborhood search for the periodic vehicle routing problem with time windows. In: Prodhon, C., et al. (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th EU/MEeting on Metaheuristics for Logistics and Vehicle Routing, Troyes, France (2008)
Resende, M., Ribeiro, C.: Greedy randomized adaptive search procedures. In: Glover, F., Kochenberger, G. (eds.) Handbook of Metaheuristics, pp. 219–249. Kluwer Academic Publishers (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Rainer-Harbach, M., Papazek, P., Hu, B., Raidl, G.R. (2013). Balancing Bicycle Sharing Systems: A Variable Neighborhood Search Approach. In: Middendorf, M., Blum, C. (eds) Evolutionary Computation in Combinatorial Optimization. EvoCOP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7832. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37198-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37198-1_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-37197-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-37198-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)