Legal and Ethical issues

Legal

Non-disclosure agreements

All students on the team have entered into a non-disclosure agreement with the stakeholder, BIXI Montréal (NEQ: 1169888808). This agreement covers technical information about the BIXI bicycles, parking stations, payment terminals, interactions between the foregoing, and information about the development, marketing, financial business models, key studies, and business forecasts related to the BIXI bike sharing system deployed in Montréal. The purpose of the NDA is to protect the contents of a meeting where certain BIXI internal tools were demonstrated to the students and not to protect the work product (see below).

Copyright

We have agreed with our stakeholder that the code produced for this project will carry an MIT license. However, we have set the repository to private for now so that we can make a final review for accidental inclusion of information covered by the non-disclosure agreement, appropriate usage of trademarks, and similar.

Signed Concordia University student project sponsorship acknowledgement

Dependency Licenses

We must ensure that the dependencies that we will use are compatible with commercial use and the codebase being licensed under the MIT license.

We have implemented automatic validation for this as part of our pre-commit hook and in our CI pipeline.

Ethical

The primary goal of this software engineering project is to provide a testbench for task dispatching algorithms that will automate the task dispatching process and provide for more efficient routes than manual intervention can provide. The following sub-sections discuss ethical concerns surrounding the project's societal and environmental impact.

Societal Impact

From an employment standpoint, this may slightly reduce the number of positions that are necessary to complete this task. However, we do not expect it to completely obviate the role of operations centre personnel for a bike sharing service. Further, we do not anticipate that the count of affected employees is large enough to raise an ethical consideration.

Environmental Impact

From an environmental standpoint, more efficient routes will reduce the time and distance spent driving in cars to service the bike network, reducing the overall impact of the network on the environment. Further, if the more efficient routes provide for a more reliable network (for example, bike availability is higher/the frequency of stations being empty is reduced), it may incentivize more people to use the bike sharing system, which is a very environmentally-friendly means of transportation. Finally, if the project reduces the number of dispatching staff required and the amount of man-hours spent on maintenance, the need for user fees to increase in the future may be reduced, making the network accessible to end-users at a lower price, which has favourable social and economic benefits.