Reducing pollutant emissions and promoting sustainable mobility solutions, including Public Transport, are increasingly becoming key objectives for policymakers worldwide. In order to jointly achieve these goals, careful consideration should be put on the operational cost and management of PT services, in order to promote the adoption of green mobility solutions and advanced management techniques by operators. In this work we develop a dynamic fleet management approach for next generation Public Transportation systems, considering the instance of mixed electric / hybrid fleet. Our objective is that of investigating to what extent electrification, coupled with optimal fleet management, can yield operational cost savings for PT operators, explicitly considering real-Time disturbances, including delays, service disruptions etc. We propose a Mixed Integer Linear Program to address the problem of optimal scheduling of a mixed fleet of electric and hybrid / non-electric buses, and employ it as predictor in a Model Predictive Control approach. Test results based upon a real-life scenario showcase how the proposed approach is indeed capable of yielding a sizable reduction in operational costs, even when considerable disturbances arise from the underlying system.@en

Holding has been extensively used as control strategy to regulate public transport operations, especially to maintain even headways and prevent buses of the same line to bunch up. Applying holding to multiple lines requires however to deal with the transition between corridor and branching segments. In this study, we introduce a holding criterion for network configurations with lines that operate jointly along a common corridor and then diverge to individual branches serving different urban areas. The proposed holding decision rule accounts for all different passenger groups in the overlapping segment and considers the transition to individual line operation. The holding rule is evaluated using simulation for different demand levels and compositions and is compared with state-of-the-art control schemes for a real-world network. Results show that the proposed multi-line control yields performance improvements along the shared transit corridor as well as at the line level. The performance of the control scheme is affected by the demand composition and we provide indications regarding the conditions under which multi-line control is advisable.@en

We consider the problem of optimally determining the sequence of electric and hybrid buses departing from a multi-line bus terminal, considering both service constraints (schedule adherence) and energy constraints (electric bus charging status, bus recharging scheduling in capacitated facilities). The problem is formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Program, with the objective of minimizing the total operational cost for the bus lines in question. System dynamics are captured by practical sets of constraints, ranging from scheduling adherence to discharge-recharge dynamics. Individual operational costs at the bus level and at the trip level are fully parametrized, allowing for extensive sensitivity analysis. We investigate a real-life case study based on the city of Luxembourg, where two charging stations have been installed in the central station's bus terminal. Experimental results show that, while full electrification is indeed possible, the required fleet size depends strongly on the given line(s) timetable.@en