Abstract:
Bicycle rental systems, which allows a person to use a bike at any time of day is a complex
behavioral system. This behavior can be influenced by different factors like the time of day
or the origin.
The study of different policies to increase the availability of the service allows analyzing
different situations and their consequences for the load of the system.
This paper proposes a comparison, through an agent-based model, of different policies
to balance the occupancy of BiciMAD bike rental service stations and therefore to the
availability of the service.
Routes for users are obtained based on the probability of the real trips. The stations will
act as passive and reactive agents. In addition, the distribution of the stations throughout
the geography of Madrid will be analyzed, obtaining areas in need of policies to regulate
their load.
The result is a 32.2% improvement in the number of stations with low occupancy and
44.7% in heavily loaded stations. An increase in the number of trips made of 23.25% is also
achieved. The simulations show saturation in the stations of the area adjoining Paseo de la
Castellana and a lack of bikes in more distant stations.