Research on the pre-peak scheduling problem of public bicycle system with branch-and-price algorithm.

Bicycle-sharing system has got fast development in recent years; the challenge associated with its operation is reposition or scheduling the bicycle because of the fluctuating demands for bicycles and for vacant lockers at each station. This paper puts forward a pre-scheduling strategy for each node in a certain period of time before the peak period, and the solution to optimise the routing cost. A novel vehicle routing problem with revenue, and improved a branch-and-price algorithm to solve the problem are also presented. The method was applied to an instance of real operation data, and the validity of the methodology has been verified.