Balancing bike sharing systems (BBSS): instance generation from the CitiBike NYC data

Abstract

Bike sharing systems are a very popular means to provide bikes to citizens in a simple and cheap way. The idea is to install bike stations at various points in the city, from which a registered user can easily loan a bike by removing it from a specialized rack. After the ride, the user may return the bike at any station (if there is a free rack). Services of this kind are mainly public or semi-public, often aimed at increasing the attractiveness of non-motorized means of transportation, and are usually free, or almost free, of charge for the users. Depending on their location, bike stations have specific patterns regarding when they are empty or full. For instance, in cities where most jobs are located near the city centre, the commuters cause certain peaks in the morning: the central bike stations are filled, while the stations in the outskirts are emptied. Furthermore, stations located on top of a hill are more likely to be empty, since users are less keen on cycling uphill to return the bike, and often leave their bike at a more reachable station. These issues result in substantial user dissatisfaction which may eventually cause the users to abandon the service. This is why nowadays most bike sharing system providers take measures to rebalance them. Over the last few years, balancing bike sharing systems (BBSS) has become increasingly studied in optimization. As such, generating meaningful instance to serve as a benchmark for the proposed approaches is an important task. In this technical report we describe the procedure we used to generate BBSS problem instances from data of the CitiBike NYC bike sharing system.