Abstract
New York launched the largest bike-sharing system in North America in May 2013. We have worked with Citibike, using analytics and optimization to change how they manage the system. Huge rush-hour usage imbalances the system; we answer both of the questions: where should bikes be at the start of a rush hour and how can we mitigate the imbalances that develop? We will survey the analytics we have employed for the former question, where we developed an approach based continuous-time Markov chains combined with integer programming models to compute daily stocking levels for the bikes, as well as methods employed for optimizing the capacity of the stations. For the latter, we will describe both heuristic methods and approximation algorithms that we have obtained for both rebalancing mid-rush hour, and overnight.