| Abstract: | With the booming of free-floating bike-sharing systems globally, collecting target bikes effectively becomes increasingly more important in practice. Although many existing studies deal with the transportation of shared bikes with trucks, the process of manual gathering scattered target bikes along truck transportation is seldom explicitly addressed. This study tackles an integrated free-floating shared bike collection problem, which includes manually moving the target bikes to selected gathering sites and transporting the gathered bikes back to the depot with trucks. We propose a location-routing model to optimize the gathering site locations, the bike gathering assignments, and the truck delivering routes integrally under the goal of minimizing a total operation cost, and we develop a heuristic approach to solve the large-size instance of our model. A case study, which is based on the real data of Mobike company in Beijing, China, is conducted to verify the effectiveness of our planning model and solution approach and to generate managerial insights and suggestions for better practices of free-floating shared bike collection. |
