Real-time inventory control and rebalancing in bike-sharing systems by using a stochastic Petri net model

Abstract

Bike sharing systems are becoming an urban mode of transportation that currently spreading in developed countries. The exploitation of such systems implies numerous operational challenges and one of them is to ensure people that they will be able to find a bike or to park it at each station. Therefore, the regulation system is necessary for maintaining a prefixed number of bikes at each station in order to fulfill at best the demand. In this paper, we develop a new stochastic Petri net model for control and performance evaluation of such transportation systems. Compared to our published works, in this paper, we consider a new rebalancing policy based on a real-time alert system with three levels of the stations control namely Ei (engorgement alert level), Pi (penury alert level) and Ri (desired level point).