A Theoretical Model to Efficiently Transport YouBike

Since bicycle itself is a low-pollution and low energy-consumption vehicle, to follow the trend of building an eco-friendly transportation system, the public bicycle sharing system has been followed for years around the world. You Bike, which is the corresponding system in Taipei city, has become more and more popular and pervasive recently. In practice, once some rental station is out of bicycles, it will automatically inform the management system to transport bicycles from the other stations as soon as possible to service commuters and increase the utilization. However, from the manager´s point of view, how to save the transport cost is the critical issue. In this paper, we find such real case is very similar to the k-server problem, which is a fascinating subject with extensive applications and deep open problems in the field of online algorithm. We borrow this problem as a theoretical model to further address many aspects of transport issues, such as the usage and capacity of the rental station, and the fuel consumption and capacity of the truck used to transport bicycles. Also, algorithms used to solve the k-server problem can achieve theoretical results as references to efficiently transport You Bike.