Dynamic Rebalancing Optimization for Bike-Sharing System Using Priority-Based MOEA/D Algorithm

Abstract

As an indispensable part of public transportation systems, the bike-sharing system (BSS) can improve road resource utilization and alleviate traffic congestion, significantly improving urban mobility. The disproportion between the demand and supply creates a giant gap for maintaining the smooth functioning of the system. To address the issue, this paper proposes a dynamic optimization rebalancing model for docked bike-sharing systems, which aims at minimizing the operation cost of rebalancing while maximizing the user satisfaction. The rebalancing demand is evaluated using both historical and predicted data so that a second time service for each station could be avoided within a rebalancing horizon. A time-window based satisfaction modeling is put forward to evaluate user satisfaction. Multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) under the rolling horizon strategy is adopted to solve the model. To improve the algorithmic performance, local search based on station priority is applied. Numerical experiments using real-world data were implemented to demonstrate the proposed model and the advantage of the improved algorithm. As the results indicate, the proposed algorithm outperforms the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) and MOEA/D without priority-based local search. Solutions with higher satisfaction profit can be discovered with the help of a local search heuristic based on station priority. The experiment also revealed that a slight increase of 7.02% (¥29.2) in the rebalancing cost could yield a significant growth of 1233.7% (¥288.7) in satisfaction profit.