High-Coverage Point-to-Point Transit Electric Vehicle Operations

Electric vehicles (EVs) have substantial potential for fleet applications as energy-efficient vehicles with fewer carbon-based emissions. However, EV utilization brings other concerns related to limited vehicle ranges and battery-charging issues, and thus the recharging infrastructure needs to be carefully designed and financially supported. This study focuses on the use of an EV fleet for an innovative transportation alternative called high-coverage point-to-point transit (HCPPT), which involves a sufficient number of deployed small vehicles that respond to real-time desires for point-to-point travel of individual travelers. As large-scale fleet operation of EVs and the HCPPT system are both envisaged only as future transportation alternatives, the benefits of combining these options have to be modeled and studied. Possible infrastructure investment benefits could result for both systems when transfer-hub locations of HCPPT are used as electric-charging locations. This paper studied the performance results from the simulation of a real-world transfer-hub system and developed certain vehicle-routing schemes to handle the specifics of EV operations. Alternative ways to schedule the charging of EVs were modeled with different insertion heuristics within vehicle-routing optimization. The results showed that the battery-charging limitations of EVs do not significantly affect the efficiency of the HCPPT system and revealed the importance of details such as the number of required charging stations at the hub locations.