Logistics Strategies for Public Bike Sharing Systems based on Dependency of Rental Stations

Over this past couple of years, environmental changes has long been controversial issue for many countries. Many countries contribute a lot in promoting transportation with high energy efficiency and low carbon emission, or even new energy source. For this reason, many advanced countries make efforts in promoting Green Transport and Eco-Mobility as well as providing public bicycle system like France, Netherland, Germany and Denmark. This not only provides first mile and last mile interchange for public transport but also acts as recreation. Since 2007, Taiwan has started the public bicycle system and kept improving the road condition. Up to now, the high turnover rate has been recognized all over the world. With rapid development of public bicycle system, the bicycle network is expanding with increasing users. However, “Insufficient amount of bicycle to be borrowed” and “Insufficient Parking Space” occurs frequently during the rush hours. To solve with this difficulty, Reposition Strategy is necessary in balancing the bicycle amount and parking space which becomes a main issue developing the green transport. This research utilizes Taipei Youbike open source, developing biking reposition strategies for public bicycle system based on high dependency, especially for high turnover stations. The next step uses data mining approach for finding high turnover rate of rental station as adoption of repositioning strategy. The analysis is based on the riding habit with parking pattern and review the existing operation and reposition strategy. Based on the aforementioned results, the research adopts 3 repositioning approaches: (1) Improvement on existing reposition approach, (2) Reposition strategy based on bicycle flows, (3) Reposition based on bicycle flows with collective compensation. The final step utilizes optimization model for further evaluation works. The final result proves that the approaches make great improvement in repositioning, which can be act as reference for future operators.