RHEA: Demand-supply asymmetRy mitigation witH modular Electric bus plAtforms
Research Project, 2021
– 2022
The “asymmetry” between spatiotemporally varying passenger demand and fixed-capacitated public
transit supply has been a long-standing problem for public transit planning, design and operations. The
concept of modular vehicles (MV) by “NEXT Future Transportation Inc.” can be considered as an elastic
medium reconciling the above-mentioned asymmetry. Although it sounds promising, there are several
fundamental problems that are in the focus of this project: 1) network (high- or macroscopic) and 2)
intersection (microscopic) level coordination. For the macroscopic system scheduling of station-based
docking pods, we investigate macroscopic MV fleet management problems constrained to battery
capacity and charging time. The decision variables include vehicle formation and time of each dispatch.
We will focus on dynamic programming, back pressure algorithm, and reinforcement learning methods
to solve it. For the microscopic optimal coordination at urban bottlenecks, optimally coupling/decoupling
of modules and optimal route related passenger movements will be solved via low level optimization
(such as tree search algorithms).
Participants
Xiaobo Qu (contact)
Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Geology and Geotechnics
Jelena Andric
Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Vehicle Engineering and Autonomous Systems
Pinar Boyraz Baykas
Chalmers, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences (M2), Vehicle Safety
Balázs Adam Kulcsár
Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Systems and control
Jiaming Wu
Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Geology and Geotechnics
Collaborations
NEXT Future Transportation Inc
USA
University of South Florida
Tampa, USA
Funding
Chalmers
Funding Chalmers participation during 2021–2022
Related Areas of Advance and Infrastructure
Transport
Areas of Advance