Flexible Pricing Strategies in Electric Free-Floating Bicycle Sharing

Bike sharing is an important tool to reduce congestion and pollution in urban areas. Electrically Power Assisted Bicycles (EPAC's) make cycling possible also for sedentary people. Standard EPAC's are difficultly integrable into a free-floating sharing system because the battery pack requires frequent recharging. This paper studies the challenges, opportunities and solutions of implementing a free-floating bike sharing system based on electric bicycles. The analysis revolves around the charge sustaining paradigm. The idea of charge sustaining leverages the metabolic efficiency gaps to reduce the overall physical effort required without determining a net discharge of the battery. Already validated in private bicycles, the idea needs to be modified and adapted to the challenges of a shared fleet. The paper analyzes two approaches to the fleet level energy management and assistance control of a fleet of charge sustaining bicycles. Specifically, we compare a fixed price approach against a flexible pricing approach where the user can select the cost based on the pedaling effort they are willing to exercise. A simulation framework (calibrated on data collected during a large trial in Milan, Italy) assesses the operational costs and revenues of the two approaches quantifying how they depend on the design and environmental parameters. We provide and validate a lower bound in terms of usage rate that guarantees economic sustainability, additionally showing that a flexible pricing strategy can lower this bound and grant more degrees of freedom to the users

Robotic Autonomous Loco-Manipulation For Logistics In Industrial Plants

The machine tending in a productive plant typically requires the transport of material from a storage area to a productive area. The plant logistics phase is a part of the production process that is often performed manually, due to the technological challenges related to the manipulation of objects in constrained environments, such as the shelf of a warehouse. However, an effort for its automation is justified by the fact that for a human operator, this activity is fatiguing, not ergonomic, and with low added value. This paper proposes a control framework for the automation of plant logistics for an industrial case study, integrating navigation and object manipulatio