System energy optimisation strategies for metros with regeneration

Energy and environmental sustainability in transportation are becoming ever more important. In Europe, the transportation sector is responsible for about 30% of the final end use of energy. Electrified railway systems play an important role in contributing to the reduction of energy usage and CO₂ emissions compared with other transport modes. For metro-transit systems with frequently motoring and braking trains, the effective use of regenerated braking energy is a significant way to reduce the net energy consumption. Although eco-driving strategies have been studied for some time, a comprehensive understanding of how regeneration affects the overall system energy consumption has not been developed. This paper proposes a multi-train traction power network modelling method to determine the system energy flow of the railway system with regenerating braking trains. The initial results show that minimising traction energy use is not the same as minimising the system energy usage in a metro system. An integrated optimisation method is proposed to solve the system energy-saving problem, which takes train movement and electrical power flow into consideration. The results of a study of the Beijing Yizhuang metro line indicate that optimised operation could reduce the energy consumption at the substations by nearly 38.6% compared to that used with the existing ATO operation.     

Closed-form multiclass cell transmission model enhanced with overtaking,lane-changing,and first-in first-out properties

A novel multiclass macroscopic model is proposed in this article. In order to enhance first-in, first-out property (FIFO) and transmission function in the multiclass traffic modeling, a new multiclass cell transmission model with FIFO property (herein called FM-CTM) is extended from its prior multiclass cell transmission model (M-CTM). Also, to enhance its analytical compactness and resultant computational convenience, FM-CTM is formulated in this paper as a set of closed-form matrix equations. The objective is to improve the accuracy of traffic state estimation by enforcing FIFO property when a fast vehicle cannot overtake a slow vehicle due to a limitation of a single-lane road. Moreover, the proposed model takes into account a different priority for vehicles of each class to move forward through congested road conditions, and that makes the flow calculation independent from their free-flow speeds. Some hypothetical and real-world freeway networks with a constant or varying number of lanes are selected to verify FM-CTM by comparing with M-CTM and the conventional CTM. Observed densities of VISSIM and real-world dataset of I-80 are selected to compare with the simulated densities from the three CTMs. The numerical results show that FM-CTM outperforms the other two models by 15% of accuracy measures in most cases. Therefore, the proposed model is expected to be well applicable to the road network with a mixed traffic and varying number of lanes.     

Tradable network permits: A new scheme for the most efficient use of network capacity

Akamatsu et al. (2006) proposed a new transportation demand management scheme called “tradable bottleneck permits” (TBP), and proved its efficiency properties for a single bottleneck model. This paper explores the properties of a TBP system for general networks. An equilibrium model is first constructed to describe the states under the TBP system with a single OD pair. It is proved that equilibrium resource allocation is efficient in the sense that the total transportation cost in a network is minimized. It is also shown that the “self-financing principle” holds for the TBP system. Furthermore, theoretical relationships between TBP and congestion pricing (CP) are discussed. It is demonstrated that TBP has definite advantages over CP when demand information is not perfect, whereas both TBP and CP are equivalent for the perfect information case. Finally, it is shown that the efficiency result also holds for more general demand conditions.     

基于BP网络的球鼻首参数化优化

本文以某集装箱船为研究对象,对降速航行后的球鼻首进行优化。采用Catia建立船体三维模型,为了产生不同形状的球鼻首,选取球鼻特征参数来描述其基本结构;采用拉丁超立方试验抽样方法得到12组不同形状的球鼻首,提出运用非线性拟合能力较强的BP网络构建球鼻首参数和阻力系数之间的关系模型;采用遗传算法对训练后的网络进行极值寻优。结果显示,优化船型的阻力系数显著降低,说明该方法对球鼻首的优化有一定的借鉴意义。     

Emission rates of intermodal rail/road and road-only transportation in Europe: A comprehensive simulation study

Intermodal rail/road transportation combines advantages of both modes of transport and is often seen as an effective approach for reducing the environmental impact of freight transportation. This is because it is often expected that rail transportation emits less greenhouse gases than road transportation. However, the actual emissions of both modes of transport depend on various factors like vehicle type, traction type, fuel emission factors, payload utilization, slope profile or traffic conditions. Still, comprehensive experimental results for estimating emission rates from heavy and voluminous goods in large-scale transportation systems are hardly available so far. This study describes an intermodal rail/road network model that covers the majority of European countries. Using this network model, we estimate emission rates with a mesoscopic model within and between the considered countries by conducting a large-scale simulation of road-only transports and intermodal transports. We show that there are high variations of emission rates for both road-only transportation and intermodal rail/road transportation over the different transport relations in Europe. We found that intermodal routing is more eco-friendly than road-only routing for more than 90% of the simulated shipments. Again, this value varies strongly among country pairs.     

基于PSO-BP神经网络的油船中部结构优化

以舱段质量为目标函数,以相关规范要求的板厚及应力为约束条件,通过灵敏度分析确定设计变量,对油船中部结构优化。构建基于粒子群优化的BP神经网络模型,并代替有限元分析确定应力与设计变量之间关系,从而对舱段进行结构优化。优化后舱段质量降低了4.2%,优化后的有限元分析结果表明满足规范要求,PSOBP神经网络模型在船舶结构优化设计中具有可行性。     

基于神经网络的小时间粒度交通流预测模型

为解决传统车队离散模型基于概率分布假设和现有交通流预测时间粒度过大不能应用于自适应信号配时优化等问题.在车队离散模型的建模思路上,先分析了下游交叉口车辆到达与上游交叉口车辆离去之间的关系,基于此构建了基于神经网络的小时间粒度交通流预测模型.该模型以上游交叉口离去流量分布为输入,下游交叉口到达流量分布为输出,时间粒度为5 s.最后,通过实际调查数据标定模型参数并应用模型预测下游交叉口到达流量.结果表明,与Robertson模型相比,本文模型预测结果能够更好地反映交通流的变化特征,平均预测误差减少了8.3%.成果可用于信号配时优化.     

考虑拥挤的轨道交通网络时刻表协调优化建模

以非连通型城市轨道交通网络为研究对象,根据城市轨道交通网络周期性运行特点,在深入考虑拥挤及换乘客流脉冲性到达特征的前提下,给出1个循环周期内城市轨道交通网络运营费用及乘客出行费用计算方法.并在此基础上,以各运营线路发车间隔及发车时刻相位差为决策变量,以乘客及运营企业的综合费用最小为目标,以列车发车间隔、列车容量、站台容量、运营补贴等为约束,建立城市轨道交通网络列车时刻表优化模型.根据模型特点,提出了一种基于仿真的遗传算法对模型进行求解.算例结果显示,与既有优化方法相比,本文模型能够更加细致地刻画乘客换乘过程,有效降低系统综合费用,并确保各项服务指标在安全范围之内.     

Large-scale dynamic transportation network simulation: A space-time-event parallel computing approach

This paper describes a computationally efficient parallel-computing framework for mesoscopic transportation simulation on large-scale networks. By introducing an overall data structure for mesoscopic dynamic transportation simulation, we discuss a set of implementation issues for enabling flexible parallel computing on a multi-core shared memory architecture. First, we embed an event-based simulation logic to implement a simplified kinematic wave model and reduce simulation overhead. Second, we present a space-time-event computing framework to decompose simulation steps to reduce communication overhead in parallel execution and an OpenMP-based space-time-processor implementation method that is used to automate task partition tasks. According to the spatial and temporal attributes, various types of simulation events are mapped to independent logical processes that can concurrently execute their procedures while maintaining good load balance. We propose a synchronous space-parallel simulation strategy to dynamically assign the logical processes to different threads. The proposed method is then applied to simulate large-scale, real-world networks to examine the computational efficiency under different numbers of CPU threads. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the implemented parallel computing algorithm can significantly improve the computational efficiency and it can reach up to a speedup of 10 on a workstation with 32 computing threads.     

Forecasting current and next trip purpose with social media data and Google Places

Trip purpose is crucial to travel behavior modeling and travel demand estimation for transportation planning and investment decisions. However, the spatial-temporal complexity of human activities makes the prediction of trip purpose a challenging problem. This research, an extension of work by Ermagun et al. (2017) and Meng et al. (2017), addresses the problem of predicting both current and next trip purposes with both Google Places and social media data. First, this paper implements a new approach to match points of interest (POIs) from the Google Places API with historical Twitter data. Therefore, the popularity of each POI can be obtained. Additionally, a Bayesian neural network (BNN) is employed to model the trip dependence on each individual’s daily trip chain and infer the trip purpose. Compared with traditional models, it is found that Google Places and Twitter information can greatly improve the overall accuracy of prediction for certain activities, including “EatOut”, “Personal”, “Recreation” and “Shopping”, but not for “Education” and “Transportation”. In addition, trip duration is found to be an important factor in inferring activity/trip purposes. Further, to address the computational challenge in the BNN, an elastic net is implemented for feature selection before the classification task. Our research can lead to three types of possible applications: activity-based travel demand modeling, survey labeling assistance, and online recommendations.