Designating City-Wide Collaborative Geofence Sites for Renting and Returning Dock-Less Shared Bikes

The dock-less shared bike systems provide a convenient transportation mode for users to find, ride, or return a bike anywhere via GPS-based smartphone apps, with the bike position turmoil arises as side effects. To solve this problem, the geofence technology has been explored and then equipped in the ride-sharing service. However, the inadequate utilization and unreasonable distribution of the geographical resource impact the effectiveness of the geofence sites seriously. In this paper, we propose a collaborative geofence site selection (CGSS), which first pick up the hotspots based on a density-based and collaboration-inspired method, and then allocate the geofence sites in the top-ranking hotspots. The CGSS aims to optimize the distribution location and the occupied area for each geofence in the city, so as to maximize the satisfactory degree of customers for both coverage ratio and capacity, with the total supplied geographical area for building geofence sites. The experimental results show that the CGSS method distributes geofence sites with a highly satisfactory degree and utilization rate.