Smart management of next generation bike sharing systems using Internet of Things

Bike sharing systems (BSSs) are increasingly popular in cities world-wide as a sustainable, eco-friendly and flexible transportation mode. The flexibility in BSSs comes with challenges relating to unpredictable and dynamic demand and asymmetric usage, which frequently lead a BSS to an imbalanced system and make bike distribution a difficult task. Integration of bike sharing into multimodal journey planning will bring new challenges to the next generation BSSs because of its reservation requirement, which may limit the flexibility of a BSS. Next generation smart bikes with sensing, computing and communication capabilities can be a part of an Internet of Things (IoT). IoT-integrated BSSs will provide operators real-time and non-real-time information about user demands, bikes and environments to improve their services and offer new ones. The IoT's characteristics, including a large-scale network of things (bikes), devices and network level heterogeneity, and dynamic mobility of bikes, will make the collection of real-time information and the development of various BSS-related services including a bike distribution service (BDS), a very challenging task. In general, a framework with appropriate middleware features can ease the information collection and development process by integrating heterogeneous computing and communications devices. In this article, we outline a set of services that would enhance next generation BSSs, and present a framework for a next-generation IoT-integrated BSS to offer those services exploiting real-time as well as non-real-time information. In addition, a hybrid BDS (HBDS) using the real-time information on bikes, demands (bike and parking) and other events (e.g., city events, weather) provided by the framework is presented. An initial evaluation of the HBDS highlights the potential of the scheme.