A Gig Worker-Centric Approach for Efficient Picking and Delivery of Electric Scooters

Electric scooter rental companies such as Bird and Lime rely on gig workers to recharge their scooters. This paper discusses some of the limitations of the compensation schemes of these companies and the processes that these companies utilize to pick and deliver electric scooters. These limitations are discussed from the perspective of a gig worker. In the proposed approach, gig workers provide their schedule, capacity, and travel requirements to the app and the app then assigns the scooters (or delivery stations) to the gig workers. Two integer programming models, which minimize the overall effort necessary to collection and deliver scooters are presented. Numeric experiments that show the potential productivity gains from the proposed approach over the existing approach are presented. The main objective of this research is to present analytical methods that can be utilized to increase the productivity of the system, reduce the revenue uncertainty of gig workers, and thus make the job of a charger more attractive.