Comparing (Power) Charging Mechanisms for Fleets of E-Scooters

Shared e-bike and e-scooter systems are globally popular solutions for urban mobility. However, they introduce new operational challenges around charging batteries and many charging mechanisms have been proposed, including crowd sourcing, employees swapping batteries, charging stations and battery kiosks. We develop a model that allows us to compare these different charging mechanisms and quantifies the impact on platform performance. The model relies on both 1) a pricing scheme that ensures balanced flow through all regions of a city and 2) a closed queueing network model of bike/scooter dynamics. We give a tractable approach to computing throughput and prove that large systems using a certain simple state independent pricing scheme are asymptotically optimal within the class of all state-dependent pricing schemes. We close out the talk by demonstrating the techniques on the e-scooter system in the city of Minneapolis.

This seminar will take place in person in Mandeville Building, room T09-67. Alternatively, click here or follow the information below to join the seminar online via Zoom.

Meeting ID: 993 8982 7615

Passcode: 310317