Urban areas are in need of efficient and sustainable mobility service and it seems
that one of the options that arouses more interest are public bicycles systems,
which in the last decade have been promoted in cities all over the world almost
exponentially, surpassing the 500 bike-sharing programs worldwide. This has
resulted in a continuous evolution of these systems, which, due to their recent
appearance, have practically gone ahead of the works focused on their study.
This thesis intends to develop an agent-based simulation model to emulate a bikesharing
system, in order to allow the optimization of the main strategic and tactical
system variables, such as the total number of bicycles, the number of reposition
equipment, the size of the stations and the occupancy after being repositioned, that
is, its balanced occupancy. The model will be applied and validated with the
parameter values of the system currently applied in Barcelona and an improved
scenario will be posed to analyze the performance of a better hypothetical solution
for balanced occupancy as an example of the simulator potential.
The simulation is coded in Matlab® environment, using the paradigm of Object
Oriented Programming, which aims to ease its use, understanding and expansion,
following the open-source philosophy, which has proliferated in recent years.
The document contains the description of the model and the performance of the
program, its structure, and its validation. In addition, the source code can be found
attached for its free download and use.
