A Stochastic Model for Electric Scooter Systems

Abstract

Electric scooters are becoming immensely popular across the world as a means of reliable transportation around many cities. As these e-scooters rely on batteries, it is important to understand how many of these e-scooters have enough battery life to transport riders and when these e-scooters might require a battery replacement. To this end, we develop the first stochastic model to capture the battery life dynamics of e-scooters of a large scooter network. In our model, we assume that e-scooter batteries are removable and replaced by agents called swappers. Thus, to gain some insight about the large scale dynamics of the system, we prove a mean field limit theorem and a functional central limit theorem for the fraction of e-scooters that lie in a particular interval of battery life. Exploiting the mean field limit and the functional central limit theorems, we develop an algorithm for determining the number of swappers that are needed to guarantee levels of probabilistic performance of the system. Finally, we show through a stochastic simulation and real data that our stochastic model captures the relevant dynamics.