Bikes Detention Game in Free-Float Bike Sharing Systems

Governments are trying to address the illegal parking problems in Free-Float Bicycle Sharing Systems (FFBSS) by quantitatively controlling the parking zone via geo-fencing technologies. Traffic enforcement department may punish the illegally parked bicycle by detaining them to undisclosed locations, which is difficult for the FFBSS enterprise to retrieve and incur surging operational costs. FFBSS enterprise is embracing data science to proactively reposition haphazardly parked bicycles to avoid unexpected detention. We start with a two players’ game-theoretical model to capture the main idea, wherein a government makes detention decisions for illegal parking areas while the FFBSS enterprise makes proactive repositioning decisions. We operationalize the game-theoretical model by extending such conflicts to a network, which is then solved via mixed-integer optimization to validate the robustness of our main results.