Solving a static repositioning problem in bike-sharing systems using iterated tabu search

•We study the static bike repositioning problem.•We modify the problem to improve its realism and reduce the solution space.•We solve the problem by iterated tabu search with specific operators.•We obtain high quality solutions efficiently. In this paper, we study the static bike repositioning problem where the problem consists of selecting a subset of stations to visit, sequencing them, and determining the pick-up/drop-off quantities (associated with each of the visited stations) under the various operational constraints. The objective is to minimize the total penalties incurred at all the stations. We present an iterated tabu search heuristic to solve the described problem. Experimental results show that this simple heuristic can generate high quality solutions using small computing times.