Improving fuel efficiency of connected and automated transit buses on signallised corridors

Abstract

This study proposes a trajectory planning strategy for connected and automated transit buses travelling on signallised corridors. The goal is to improve the fuel efficiency of transit buses by taking into consideration of traffic signal timings and bus schedules. The strategy takes advantage of the emerging connected vehicle technologies, allowing for utilising real-time information, including traffic signal timings, bus schedules and dynamic speed limits for trajectory optimisation. The authors construct the proposed strategy as a Min-Sum-Min Model and solve it by integrating Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation and Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is demonstrated in a real-world case study. It is discovered that the reduction in bus energy consumption by the proposed strategy is up to 27.8 and 16.4%, respectively, when compared with an aggressive strategy and an alternative strategy.