Incentivizing Users for Balancing Bike Sharing Systems

Bike sharing systems have been recently adopted by a growing number of cities as a new means of transportation offering citizens a flexible, fast and green alternative for mobility. Users can pick up or drop off the bicycles at a station of their choice without prior notice or time planning. This increased flexibility comes with the challenge of unpredictable and fluctuating demand as well as irregular flow patterns of the bikes. As a result, these systems can incur imbalance problems such as the unavailability of bikes or parking docks at stations. In this light, operators deploy fleets of vehicles which redistribute the bikes in order to guarantee a desirable service level. Can we engage the users themselves to solve the imbalance problem in bike sharing systems? In this paper, we address this question and present a crowdsourcing mechanism that incentivizes the users in the bike repositioning process by providing them with alternate choices to pick or return bikes in exchange f...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Adish Singla, Marco Santoni, Gábor Bartók, Pratik Mukerji, Moritz Meenen, Andreas Krause
• Keywords: AAAI 2015, Intelligent Agents