Cheng Researching a More Efficient Future for E-Scooters

SIE assistant professor Jianqiang Cheng is leading a new research project to develop data-driven decision-making models for e-scooter systems in Tucson. The project, funded by the National Institute for Transportation and Communities, focuses on the design and operation of these shared-mobility systems.

"The decision making process for e-scooter companies is complex," Cheng said in an NITC interview. "One of the first questions is where to locate the scooters – In the transportation network, where do e-scooters need to be placed to meet demand? The second question is how to distribute them. It gets more complicated when you introduce different electric charging methods, so that some scooters are being collected by paid contractors and others are being charged by customers through incentives."

According to NITC, the research uses data from the City of Tucson and allows for optimal placement, charging and rebalancing of idle scooters to meet demand as efficiently as possible. In the future, this research could be extended in several directions. First, to increase the robustness in uncertainty modeling, researchers could develop a distributionally robust optimization framework. They could also develop new approaches to e-scooter planning problems which are capable of solving more complex problems.