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

Publications

More information

Latest update

3/23/2022