Atac, S., Obrenovic, N., and Bierlaire, M. (2021)

A multi-objective approach for station clustering in bike sharing systems

21st Swiss Transport Research Conference, Ascona, Switzerland

Increasing environmental concerns direct people to more sustainable solutions in all fields. In transportation, one of those solutions is vehicle sharing systems. Although these systems are convenient for the users, it creates many operational challenges, such as imbalance of the vehicles throughout the service area. Usually, staff-based rebalancing operations are conducted to maintain the balance, thus to provide higher level of service. These operations become difficult to solve with the increasing number of stations. Therefore, some heuristic approaches such as clustering are used to split the problem into smaller sub problems. This paper focuses on bike sharing systems with static rebalancing operations. Two multi-objective mathematical models are specifically crafted for the rebalancing-oriented clustering problem. These models and two agglomerative hierarchical clustering approaches are compared with respect to resulting cost of rebalancing operations.