Bike3S: A Tool for Bike Sharing Systems Simulation
This tool helps urban planners and bike sharing operators optimize system performance before deployment, though it is incremental as it builds on existing simulation approaches.
The authors tackled the problem of evaluating management strategies for bike sharing systems by developing Bike3S, a simulator that performs semi-realistic, agent-based simulations to test station capacities, distributions, and balancing strategies.
Vehicle sharing systems are becoming increasingly popular. The effectiveness of such systems depends, among other factors, on different strategic and operational management decisions and policies, like the dimension of the fleet or the distribution of vehicles. It is of foremost importance to be able to anticipate and evaluate the potential effects of such strategies before they can be successfully deployed. In this paper we present Bike3S, a simulator for a station-based bike sharing system. The simulator performs semi-realistic simulations of the operation of a bike sharing system and allows for evaluating and testing different management decisions and strategies. In particular, the simulator has been designed to test different station capacities, station distributions, and balancing strategies. The simulator carries out microscopic agent-based simulations, where users of different types can be defined that act according to their individual goals and objectives which influences the overall dynamics of the whole system.