Transit agencies that operate battery-electric buses must carefully manage fast-charging infrastructure to extend daily bus range without degrading on-time performance. To support this need, we propose a mixed-integer linear programming model to schedule opportunity charging that minimizes the amount of departure delay in all trips served by electric buses. Our novel approach directly tracks queuing at chargers in order to set and propagate departure delays. Allowing but minimizing delays makes it possible to optimize performance when delays due to traffic conditions and charging needs are inevitable, in contrast with existing methods that require charging to occur during scheduled layover time. To solve the model, we develop two algorithms based on decomposition. The first is an exact solution method based on combinatorial Benders (CB) decomposition, which avoids directly enumerating the model’s logic-based “big M” constraints and their inevitable computational challenges. The second, inspired by the CB approach but more efficient, is a polynomial-time heuristic based on linear programming that we call Select–Sequence–Schedule (3S). Computational experiments on both a simple notional transit network and the real bus system of King County, Washington, USA demonstrate the performance of both methods. The 3S method appears particularly promising for creating good charging schedules quickly at real-world scale.

This paper considers the problem of supply-demand imbalances in Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) services. These imbalances occur due to uneven stochastic travel demand and can be mitigated by proactively rebalancing empty vehicles to areas where the demand is high. To achieve this, we propose a method that takes into account uncertainties of predicted travel demand while minimizing pick-up time and rebalance mileage for autonomous MoD ride-hailing. More precisely, first travel demand is predicted using Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) which provides uncertainty bounds on the prediction. We then formulate a stochastic model predictive control (MPC) for the autonomous ride-hailing service and integrate the demand predictions with uncertainty bounds. In order to guarantee constraint satisfaction in the optimization under estimated stochastic demand prediction, we employ a probabilistic constraining method with user-defined confidence interval, using Chance Constrained MPC (CCMPC). The benefits of the proposed method are twofold. First, travel demand uncertainty prediction from data can naturally be embedded into the MoD optimization framework, allowing us to keep the imbalance at each station below a certain threshold with a user-defined probability. Second, CCMPC can be relaxed into a Mixed-Integer-Linear-Program (MILP) and the MILP can be solved as a corresponding Linear-Program, which always admits an integral solution. Our transportation simulations show that by tuning the confidence bound on the chance constraint, close to optimal oracle performance can be achieved, with a median customer wait time reduction of 4% compared to using only the mean prediction of the GPR.

Developed in this paper is a traffic flow model parametrised to describe abnormal traffic behaviour. In large traffic networks, the immediate detection and categorisation of traffic incidents/accidents is of capital importance to avoid breakdowns, further accidents. First, this claims for traffic flow models capable to capture abnormal traffic condition like accidents. Second, by means of proper real-time estimation technique, observing accident related parameters, one may even categorize the severity of accidents. Hence, in this paper, we suggest to modify the nominal Aw-Rascle (AR) traffic model by a proper incident related parametrisation. The proposed Incident Traffic Flow (ITF) model is defined by introducing the incident parameters modifying the anticipation and the dynamic speed relaxation terms in the speed equation of the AR model. These modifications are proven to have physical meaning. Furthermore, the characteristic properties of the ITF model is discussed in the paper. A multi stage numerical scheme is suggested to discretise in space and time the resulting non-homogeneous system of PDEs. The resulting systems of ODE is then combined with receding horizon estimation methods to reconstruct the incident parameters. Finally, the viability of the suggested incident parametrisation is validated in a simulation environment.

We propose pro-social control strategies for connected automated vehicles (CAVs) to mitigate jamming waves in mixed-autonomy multi-lane traffic, resulting from car-following dynamics of human-driven vehicles (HDVs). Different from existing studies, which focus mostly on ego vehicle objectives to control CAVs in an individualistic manner, we devise a pro-social control algorithm. The latter takes into account the objectives (i.e., driving comfort and traffic efficiency) of both the ego vehicle and surrounding HDVs to improve smoothness of the entire observable traffic. Under a model predictive control (MPC) framework that uses acceleration and lane change sequences of CAVs as optimization variables, the problem of individualistic, altruistic, and pro-social control is formulated as a non-convex mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP) and relaxed to a convex quadratic program through converting the piece-wise-linear constraints due to the optimal velocity with relative velocity (OVRV) car-following model into linear constraints by introducing slack variables. Low-fidelity simulations using the OVRV model and high-fidelity simulations using PTV VISSIM simulator show that pro-social and altruistic control can provide significant performance gains over individualistic driving in terms of efficiency and comfort on both single- and multi-lane roads.