Bike3S: A tool for bike sharing systems simulation

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Bike sharing
• agent-based simulation
• smart transportation
• smart mobility
• multi-agent systems

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. https://github.com/gia-urjc/Bike3S-Simulator.

2. https://www.arenasimulation.com/.

3. Public bike sharing system of Madrid (Spain): https://www.bicimad.com/.

4. JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight data-interchange format. https://json.org/.

5. We use OpenStreetMap (OSM): https://www.openstreetmap.org.

6. Java reflection allows to explore object characteristics (e.g. class name, methods, instances of a class, annotations …) and to perform operations (invoke methods, create instances, etc.) at runtime. In our case, using reflection, it is possible to implement different user, recommendation system and fleet manager types and to load them into the simulator without modifying any other source code.

Additional information

Funding

This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, cofunded by EU FEDER Funds, through grants [TIN2015-65515-C4-X-R (SURF) and RTI2018-095390-B-C33] (InEDGEMobility) and by the Regional Government of Madrid (grant PEJD-2017-PRE/TIC-3412), cofunded by EU FEDER Funds.