Séminaire conjoint CIRRELT-Chaire de recherche du Canada en distributique-Chaire de recherche du Canada en logistique et en transport

TITRE : A Dynamic Bike Sharing Balancing Problem

CONFÉRENCIER : Claudio Contardo, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada

DATE et ENDROIT : 22 février 2012, 10h30, salle 5441, Pavillon André-Aisenstadt, Campus de l’Université de Montréal

RESPONSABLE : Gilbert Laporte

RÉSUMÉ : In this seminar we introduce a dynamic public bike sharing (PBS) balancing problem. PBS systems, e.g., BIXI in Montreal or Vélib in Paris consist of a set of docking stations provided with bikes from and to which users can perform trips. The size of the networks and the demands have rapidly increased in cities where the use of bike transportation is perceived as an efficient mode by the users due to economic, health and sustainabilty reasons, thus raising the logistic problem of maintaining a good quality of service at all times. Indeed, at peak hours when the majority of daily trips are performed, some docking stations receive more demand than others. These stations are often points of either pick up or delivery of bikes. If no action is performed by the service provider, these docking stations rapidly become either empty or full, thus forbidding other users from using them. The service provider holds a fleet of trucks that must be scheduled to rebalance the network, which intuitively means transporting bikes from stations where free docking points are needed to stations where bikes are needed. We introduce several formulations of the problem and a solution approach that couples column generation with benders decomposition, and present some preliminary results.