With the expansion of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) in smart cities, the shared bicycle has developed quickly as a new green public transportation mode, and is changing the travel habits of citizens heavily across the world, especially in China. The purpose of the current paper is to provide an inclusive review and survey on shared bicycle besides its benefits, history, brands and comparisons. In addition, it proposes the concept of the Internet of Shared Bicycle (IoSB) for the first time, as far as we know, to find a feasible solution for those technical problems of the shared bicycle. The possible architecture of IoSB in our opinion is presented, as well as most of key IoT technologies, and their capabilities to merge into and apply to the different parts of IoSB are introduced. Meanwhile, some challenges and barriers to IoSB’s implementation are expressed thoroughly too. As far as the advice for overcoming those barriers be concerned, the IoSB’s potential aspects and applications in smart city with respect to technology development in the future provide another valuable further discussion in this paper.

With the advent of pile-less shared bicycles, the techniques initially used for public bicycle dispatching were unable to fulfill the routine dispatch tasks, resulting in constant bicycle crowding. In this paper, to alleviate the mess of shared bicycles, we propose a hybrid dispatching algorithm based on bicycle demand data. We take the bicycle stations’ imbalance as an optimization index and use greedy ideas to ensure that after each dispatch all stations get the smallest imbalance. In addition, it is suggested that two assessment metrics evaluate the efficiency of the dispatching technique from the users and operators’ perspectives. It is shown that the proposed dispatching algorithm performs better in terms of user satisfaction and operator revenue, and is less affected by bicycle distribution compared with the traditional manual scheduling algorithm.