An AHP-DEA Approach of the Bike-Sharing Spots Selection Problem in the Free-Floating Bike-Sharing System

Abstract

The Free-Floating Bike-Sharing system (FFBSS) connects users to public transit networks and is an important component of the “last-mile” transport network. However, the rapid development of the FFBSS in China has significantly increased the local municipal workload and deteriorated the public transport. To mitigate these negative impacts, the Chinese government has launched a pilot project of electronic fence spots, by selecting several bike-sharing parking spots from the existing ones to set up the virtual stations. Compared to the traditional public shared bicycles with fixed stations, the flexibility of choosing parking spots could dynamically cater the fast-changing traffic environment and facilitate the renting and returning for users and, therefore, render a more sparse and complicate parking spots network. In this paper, we study the location selection of bike-sharing parking points as a multidimensional problem, which considers not only the interests of users and stakeholders but also the environment and safety issues. We propose a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) model including the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the weight-restricted data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to evaluate and determine the optimal bike-sharing parking points. Since the additional weight restrictions in the DEA method might lead to infeasible solutions, we introduce the weight restrictions feasibility theorem to avoid such infeasibility in the proposed weight-restricted DEA model, which has not been thoroughly studied in the literature. Specifically, a hyperplane adjusting model is developed to adjust the infeasible results. In the computational study, we evaluate 36 current parking spots in three regions in Beijing, China, to verify the rationality of the combined approach and put forward some managerial suggestions for this pilot project in Beijing, China.