Utilization-Aware Trip Advisor in Bike-Sharing Systems Based on User Behavior Analysis

The rapid development of bike-sharing systems has brought people enormous convenience during the past decade. On the other hand, high transport flexibility gives rise to problems for both users and operators. For users, dynamic distribution of shared bikes caused by uneven user demand often leads to the check in or check out service unavailable at some stations. For operators, unbalanced bike usage comes with more bike broken and growing maintenance cost. In this paper, we consider enhancing user experiences and rebalance bicycle utilization by directing users to different stations with a higher success rate of rental and return. For the first time, we devise a trip advisor that recommends bike check-in and check-out stations with joint consideration of service quality and bicycle utilization. To ensure service quality, we firstly predict the user demand of each station to obtain the success rate of rental and return in the future. Experiments indicate that the precision of our method is as much as 0.826, which has raised by 25.9 percent as compared with that of the historical average method. To rebalance bike usage, from historical data, we identify that biased bike usage is rooted from circumscribed bicycle circulation among few active stations. Therefore, with defined station activeness, we optimize the bike circulation by leading users to shift bikes between highly active stations and inactive ones. We extensively evaluate the performance of our design through real-world datasets. Evaluation results show that the percentage of frequently used bikes decreases by 33.6 percent on usage number and 28.6 percent on usage time.