The Biobjective Bike-Sharing Rebalancing Problem with Balance Intervals: A Multistart Multiobjective Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

The bike-sharing system (BSS), as a sustainable way to deal with the “last mile” problem of mass transit systems, is increasingly popular in recent years. Despite its success, the BSS tends to suffer from the mismatch of bike supply and user demand. BSS operators have to transfer bikes from surplus stations to deficit stations to redistribute them among stations by means of trucks. In this paper, we deal with the bike-sharing rebalancing problem with balance intervals (BRP-BIs), which is a variant of the static bike-sharing rebalancing problem. In this problem, the equilibrium of station is characterized by a balance interval instead of a balance point in the literature. We formulate the BRP-BI as a biobjective mixed-integer programming model with the aim of determining both the minimum cost route for a single capacitated vehicle and the maximum average rebalance utility, an index for the balanced degree of station. Then, a multistart multiobjective particle swarm optimization (MS-MOPSO) algorithm is proposed to solve the model such that the Pareto optimal solutions can be derived. The proposed algorithm is extended with crossover operator and variable neighbourhood search to enhance its exploratory capability. Compared with Hybrid NSGA-II and MOPSO, the computational experimental results demonstrate that our MS-MOPSO can obtain Pareto optimal solutions with higher quality.