Near-Optimal Battery Swapping Algorithm in Dockless Electric Bike Sharing Systems

Dockless electric bike (E-bike) sharing has become a new urban modality of green transportation to offer convenient services. Typically, the service provider arranges a truck starting from the depot to visit multiple parking locations to replace low-energy batteries. However, visiting many parking locations may cause a considerable tour cost. One efficient way is to aggregate low-energy E-bikes together. Some incentive mechanisms are thus adopted to encourage E-bike users to move their bikes to suitable parking locations, but leading to an incentive cost. The service provider would like to balance the tour cost of the truck and the incentive cost of E-bike users. To address this problem, the paper formulates an optimization problem and then proposes an approximation algorithm. The simulation results with the real dataset show that our algorithm outperforms the other baselines.