Research on the station location problem for public bicycle systems under dynamic demand

This paper proposes a station location problem for public bicycle systems under a zoning scheme with consideration for multi-period demand. The objective of the problem is to minimize the fixed construction costs and variable operational costs of the public bicycle stations. A mixed integer programming model is formulated for the problem. Owing to the computational intractability of the problem under study, a genetic algorithm and a variable neighborhood search algorithm are developed to solve the problem. Comprehensive computational experiments are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.