Connectivity-Based Accessibility for Public Bicycle Sharing Systems

An increasing number of cities are implementing bicycle sharing systems to reduce traffic congestion. Determining the locations of bicycle stations is one of the fundamental challenges in planning of such systems. This paper provides a novel solution on it. The min-plus algebra is introduced to model transport systems for accessibility analysis. A unified model in the sense of the min-plus algebra for an integrated system with both buses and bicycles is presented to dynamically describe the state transitions of passengers in the system. A new accessibility is proposed with regards to a general index ω such as the geographical distance and the travel time. A necessary and sufficient condition on the accessibility is then provided. The minimization of bicycle stations under the accessibility is formulated to be a 0-1 integer programming problem. The case studies on two cities, Ningbo and Hangzhou, were performed, which show that compared with the current layouts of urban transportation networks, the proposed public bicycle sharing systems have remarkable advantages in topological characteristics and robustness against failures.