Station Status Forecasting Module for a Multi-agent Proposal to Improve Efficiency on Bike-Sharing Usage

Urban transportation involves a number of common problems: air and acoustic pollution, traffic jams, and so forth. This has become an important topic of study due to the interest in solving these issues in different areas (economical, social, ecological, etc.). Nowadays, one of the most popular urban transport systems are the shared vehicles systems. Among these systems there are the shared bicycle systems which have an special interest due to its characteristics. While solving some of the problems mentioned above, these systems also arise new problems such as the distribution of bicycles over time and space. Traditional approaches rely on the service provider to balancing the system, thus generating extra costs. Our proposal consists on an multi-agent system that includes user actions as a balancing mechanism, taking advantage of their trips to optimize the overall balance of the system. With this goal in mind the user is persuaded to deviate slightly from its origin/destination by providing appropriate arguments and incentives. This article presents the prediction module that will enable us to create such persuasive system. This module allow us to predict the demand for bicycles in the stations, forecasting the number of available parking spots (or available bikes). With this information the multi-agent system is capable of scoring alternative stations and routes and making offers to balance bikes across the stations. In order to achieve this, the most proper offers for the user will be predicted and used to persuade her.