Challenges and opportunities in dock-based bike-sharing rebalancing: a systematic review

Abstract

Bike-sharing systems (BSS) have raised in popularity in the last years due to their potential share in sustainable cities. Although the first attempts to implement a bike-sharing public service date back to 1965 (Amsterdam), their widespread use arrived with the millennium becoming a vibrant research area whose activity has increased steadily in the last decade. Several authors have attempted to summarize the current state of the art, but the literature on BSS is still scattered in different fields. Thus, there is a lack of literature that summarizes and categorizes the available research on BSS. In this paper, we perform a thorough review of the challenges behind rebalancing in bike-sharing systems. The objectives of this paper are to collect papers on the repositioning problem in dock-based bike-sharing services, classify them and point to novel research venues. We render a keyword analysis in the literature and a timeline that shows the evolution of those keywords throughout the last decade. We also include an exhaustive table that will assist researchers from different disciplines to address the open challenges in the field and to transition towards more sustainable cities.