Energy-Efficiency Models of Sustainable Urban Transportation Structure Optimization

Abstract

With the increasing numbers of cars and trips in cites, energy consumption and environmental pollution have become key problems of urban transport. In particular, the increasing use of private cars not only causes more energy consumption and produces more exhaust, but also makes the transportation structure unbalanced. Thus, a rationalized transport structure must be established and optimized to promote the sustainable development of urban transport. This paper presents some energy-efficiency models of sustainable urban transport structure optimization. Their objective functions are to minimize the energy consumption, and their constraints are carbon dioxide emission and traffic efficiency. The models were solved via the artificial fish swarm algorithm and used to optimize the urban transport structure of Harbin city in China. The results indicate that the models can not only guarantee the benefit of travelers and reduce the carbon emission, but also minimize energy consumption of the urban transportation.