Destination Prediction Based on Virtual POI Docks in Dockless Bike-Sharing System

As the sharing economy develops and bike-sharing apps emerge, the dockless bike-sharing system (DLBS) has become a competitive alternative to the docked bike-sharing system because of its convenience of finding and parking without physical docks. Meanwhile, new demands are rapidly increasing as DLBS expands, e.g., crowd-sourced re-balancing and pre-ordering during rush hours. A more fine-grained destination prediction is required to tackle these issues. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic-trip-based destination prediction method named P
³
M. To overcome the uncertainty due to docks’ absence, we introduce the virtual docks derived from POIs and convert a single trip recorded in GPS into several probabilistic trips among POIs using an innovative user behavior model Walking-Riding-Walking Probabilistic Trip. To deal with sparsity, P
³
M adapts a trip-wised parameter share strategy together with a statistical-based history-feature extractor for better performance without overfitting. Compared with the baseline method, P
³
M reduces the mean absolute errors measured with distance by 31.55% (from 1.1036 km to 0.7554 km) and is less sensitive to the sparsity of user’s records. Further, we analyze the application of P
³
M in different types of DLBS and use two simulations to prove its efficiency under insufficient bike supply circumstances.