Mobility Modeling and Data-Driven Closed-Loop Prediction in Bike-Sharing Systems

As an innovative mobility strategy, public bike-sharing has grown dramatically worldwide. Though it provides convenient, low-cost, and environmental-friendly transportation, the unique features of bike-sharing systems give rise to problems for both users and operators. The primary issue is the uneven distribution of bikes caused by ever-changing usage and (available) supply. This imbalance necessitates efficient bike rebalancing strategies, which depends highly on bike mobility modeling and prediction. In this paper, a trace-driven simulation-based prediction approach is proposed by simultaneously taking user mobility demand and real-time status of stations into consideration. We extensively evaluate the performance of our design with the dataset from one of the world’s largest public bike-sharing systems located in Hangzhou, China, which owns more than 2800 stations. The evaluation results show an 85 percentile relative error of 0.6 for checkout and 0.4 for checkin prediction. The preliminary results on how the predictions can be used for bike rebalancing are also provided. We believe that this new mobility modeling and prediction approach can improve the bike-sharing system operation algorithm design and pave the way for rapid deployment and adoption of bike-sharing systems across the globe.