A Real-Time Bike Trip Planning Policy With Self-Organizing Bike Redistribution

Bike Sharing Systems (BSSs) have emerged as an economical and eco-friendly solution to alleviate the last-mile problem in intelligent transport systems. As an exclusive route selection problem in BSSs, Bike Trip Planning (BTP) has a clear goal: to select the available routes with minimum time cost for bike users, while satisfying their basic needs, e.g., the bounded longest walking distance. In this paper, we propose a real-time Lyapunov-based Bike Trip Planning (LBTP) policy that considers the users' waiting at stations, which has not been sufficiently studied in the literature. Both the total time cost and the service rate of all users are the core criteria of a BSS, so we make use of the Lyapunov optimization theory to make a tradeoff between them. Our policy can achieve self-organizing bike redistribution without extra redistribution budget required. The evaluation results show the superiority of our policy on the both system utility and user service rate compared with the existing BTP policies, and reveal the extra travel time fairness degree among different types of users under our policy.