Simulation evaluation for on-demand bus system with electrical vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on a new transport system called on-demand bus system which is introduced on a trial basis to local cities in Japan. In the system, share-ride buses transport customers door-to-door according to user's requests. A user can specify the position and time to get the bus in the service area, thus the on-demand bus is more flexible and profitable system compared to traditional transport systems (i.e., fixed route bus). Electrical vehicles are also attracting attention as a new transportation device in these years. The electric vehicles are environmentally friendly because they produce zero emissions and do not pollute the air. However, there is some issues to be solved for practical use of electrical vehicles, i.e., the price of charger and the mileage per charge. Therefore, we adopt an evolutionary approach to solve a path optimization problem for the on-demand bus with electrical vehicles. It is very important to reduce the amount of recharge time for effective operation of electrical vehicles. An evolutionary algorithm minimizes the traveling distance of vehicles by a mutation operation (i.e., the exchange of sub-routes of vehicles) in order to reduce the amount of recharge time. We will show some comparison experiments by computer simulation, and show the performance of our algorithm for the on-demand bus with electrical vehicles.