Urban Vehicle Research Articles

Combined method for determining the optimal flow distribution plan for mining, urban electric vehicles and for charging stations

The increase in the share of electric transport in mining and municipal enterprises in the short term may lead to changes in the structure of the transport fleet of enterprises and can affect the technology of work, in particular, surface mining operations. Changes in technology relate to the need for charging batteries, as well as the appropriate economic and technological planning. Having implemented the combinatorial representation and using the chain diagrams, a new method has been developed for determining the optimal plan of the vehicles flow distribution at the charging station of industrial enterprises, which provides the greatest enterprise profit. The developed mathematical model of vehicle flow at the charging station is compiled taking into account the objective constraints related to the cyclicality of the station loading capacity. The optimal plan for the vehicles flow distribution at the charging station is, based on geometric representations, as the greatest distance from the beginning of the reference to the plane (hyperplane), which passes through the vertex of the polyhedron of the area of admissible solutions and is oriented by the gradient of the target function (enterprise profit). The task becomes urgent in the light of the electrification of industrial transport and the improvement of batteries for them.

Research on Dynamic of Urban Rail Vehicle of Variable Speed and Long-wave Excitation Conditions

Research on Dynamic of Urban Rail Vehicle of Variable Speed and Long-wave Excitation Conditions

A Case Study: The Urban Residents’ Choice for Electric Vehicles Warning Sounds

Nowadays, people are exposed to noise on a daily basis. Therefore, in an overvibrant urban environments electrical vehicles operating at low speed are too quiet to be detected by pedestrians (especially vulnerable group are visually impaired people) and urban residents in general. Thus, electric vehicle warning sounds are sounds created to alert and warn pedestrians to the presence of electrical vehicles (e.g. hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and all-electric vehicles) moving at low speeds. The goal of this paper is to determine through a case study what the pedestrians would desire and prefer the electrical vehicle warning audio signals to sound like. The case study involved 201 participants who had the task to fulfil a specially designed questionnaire for this purpose. Regarding the questionnaire, the participants were not prepared in any way for the testing they were just advised to keep in mind that the warning sound they select for the “role” of a pedestrian should not be irritable at the same time for the “role” of a driver. The results obtained from the questionnaire were analyzed and discussed in the paper. When speaking about the concept of smart cities and the legislation around the whole world today this is certainly a hot topic where the opinion of pedestrians and future drivers should not be overlooked.

Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network for Urban Vehicle Trajectory Prediction

As the number of various positioning sensors and location-based devices increase, a huge amount of spatial and temporal information data is collected and accumulated. These data are expressed as trajectory data by connecting the data points in chronological sequence, and these data contain movement information of any moving object. Particularly, in this study, urban vehicle trajectory prediction is studied using trajectory data of vehicles in urban traffic network. In the previous work, Recurrent Neural Network model for urban vehicle trajectory prediction is proposed. For the further improvement of the model, in this study, we propose Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network model for urban vehicle trajectory prediction. In this proposed model, we use attention mechanism to incorporate network traffic state data into urban vehicle trajectory prediction. The model is evaluated by using the Bluetooth data collected in Brisbane, Australia, which contains the movement information of private vehicles. The performance of the model is evaluated with 5 metrics, which are BLEU-1, BLEU-2, BLEU-3, BLEU-4, and METEOR. The result shows that ARNN model have better performance compared to RNN model.

A Large-Scale Urban Vehicular Network Framework for IoT in Smart Cities

Gathering extensive public data from the IoT devices scattered throughout a city is a significant challenge in a smart city. In this paper, a novel urban vehicle network we call the location-based urban vehicle network (LUV), is proposed to perform the non-real time data gathering task in smart cities. Different from the most works in-vehicle networks, the empirical research on the real-life 8900 private cars trace data in Changsha, China, compels us to focus on the parked vehicles and the parking places, rather than on the moving cars and the urban roads. The location-based mechanism not only provides more reliable and predictable wireless connections but also dramatically simplifies the system topology. It ensures that the vehicle network deployed on an intricate metropolitan area reaches the desired scale for gathering data.

Object Detection and Tracking using Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Video Surveillance Applications

Data is the new oil in current technological society. The impact of efficient data has changed benchmarks of performance in terms of speed and accuracy. The enhancement is visualizable because the processing of data is performed by two buzzwords in industry called Computer Vision (CV) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Two technologies have empowered major tasks such as object detection and tracking for traffic vigilance systems. As the features in image increases demand for efficient algorithm to excavate hidden features increases. Convolution Neural Network (CNN) model is designed for urban vehicle dataset for single object detection and YOLOv3 for multiple object detection on KITTI and COCO dataset. Model performance is analyzed, evaluated and tabulated using performance metrics such as True Positive (TP), True Negative (TN), False Positive (FP), False Negative (FN), Accuracy, Precision, confusion matrix and mean Average Precession (mAP). Objects are tracked across the frames using YOLOv3 and Simple Online Real Time Tracking (SORT) on traffic surveillance video. This paper upholds the uniqueness of the state of the art networks like DarkNet. The efficient detection and tracking on urban vehicle dataset is witnessed. The algorithms give real-time, accurate, precise identifications suitable for real-time traffic applications.

Urban logistics of small electric vehicle charged from a photovoltaic carport

The technology of photovoltaic solar cells can be combined with the technology of electric vehicles. During charging electric vehicles with Renewable Energy Sources (RES) as well as during their use to the atmosphere are not emitted any pollutions. The article presents a carport designed for charging electric vehicle. Paper analyzed the power course generated by the photovoltaic system in different weather conditions. As a result of the comparison with the current demands of the electric vehicle battery during the charging process the optimal way of battery charging process was discussed. Later in the article presents logistics research on charging battery of an urban vehicle used frequently by catering companies to distribute products. The authors’ aim was to determine the actual range of the small electric vehicle on a single charge, as well as to statistically compile driving parameters in conditions of urban traffic in Lublin. The process of using such a vehicle has been analyzed, including the necessary battery charging. On the basis of the tests results a set of recommendations for small electric cars users was made in order to help increase the range of the vehicles in traffic and lengthen battery life.

Design and research on the function of lithium-ion batteries emergency traction system for rail vehicles

Urban rail vehicle power supply short interruptions or prolonged paralysis situation sometimes occurs, which will cause the entire line outage. If the train through the battery to achieve emergency traction, it will be able to effectively solve the problem of train interval stop due to external power supply reasons. This article proposes an emergency traction system, using lithium-ion batteries as traction power, carrying out the design and research on the function of lithium-ion emergency traction system for rail transit vehicles. Through the design of the power supply system, the design of the emergency traction power supply, the design of the conversion control and safety protection circuit, the design of the traction system, and the design of the auxiliary system, the train can be run to the next station under the emergency power supply, and the effectiveness of the scheme is verified by simulation. Moreover, the transformation on the basis of the existing Shanghai 952 train illustrates the feasibility of the existing train to achieve the emergency traction function and provides guarantee for the safe operation of the train.

A robust graph optimization realization of tightly coupled GNSS/INS integrated navigation system for urban vehicles

This paper describes a robust integrated positioning method to provide ground vehicles in urban environments with accurate and reliable localization results. The localization problem is formulated as a maximum a posteriori probability estimation and solved using graph optimization instead of Bayesian filter. Graph optimization exploits the inherent sparsity of the observation process to satisfy the real-time requirement and only updates the incremental portion of the variables with each new incoming measurement. Unlike the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) in a typical tightly coupled Global Navigation Satellite System/Inertial Navigation System (GNSS/INS) integrated system, optimization iterates the solution for the entire trajectory. Thus, previous INS measurements may provide redundant motion constraints for satellite fault detection. With the help of data redundancy, we add a new variable that presents reliability of GNSS measurement to the original state vector for adjusting the weight of corresponding pseudorange residual and exclude faulty measurements. The proposed method is demonstrated on datasets with artificial noise, simulating a moving vehicle equipped with GNSS receiver and inertial measurement unit. Compared with the solutions obtained by the EKF with innovation filtering, the new reliability factor can indicate the satellite faults effectively and provide successful positioning despite contaminated observations.

Edge-empowered accurate urban vehicle localization with cellular-aware trajectories

Acquiring accurate vehicle location information in urban settings is very challenging due to the complexity of urban environments. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, called UPS, to tackle urban vehicle localization problem. After extensive empirical study, we find that GSM power spectrogram collected over a distance has ideal temporal–spatial characteristics for fingerprinting. Encouraged by this observation, UPS tries to utilize the geographical trajectory and the associated GSM power spectrogram information of a moving vehicle to identify its location with reference to a map. To this end, two appealing techniques, i.e., online vehicle localization and GSM map construction, are elegantly integrated. With the former, a vehicle can accurately fix its location under complex urban environments. With the latter, a reliable metropolitan-scale GSM power map can be cost-efficiently built at edges, leveraging the strong power of crowdsourcing. By design, UPS is light-weight, requiring only a minimum hardware deployment. We implement a prototype system to validate the feasibility of the UPS design. Furthermore, we conduct extensive trace-driven simulations and results show that UPS can work stably in various urban settings and achieve an accuracy of 5.3 m with a 90% precision, overwhelming the performance of GPS by five times.

Innovative Urban Transportation Means Developed by Integrating Design Methods

The aim of this article is to apply some design methodologies to define, as a first objective, an optimized technical specification and then, as a second objective, to manage the transition from conceptual design to construction project of an innovative means of urban transport, meeting the needs of ‘renewable energy’ requirements, which then decline into this new urban vehicle formed by a hoverboard and an electric scooter. The first part of the article is focused on the conceptual design of the means by using methodologies such as the Quality Function Deployment (QFD), applied in the first phase of the work to compare some of the most popular electric scooters on the market; we then used a typical method for product marketing, i.e., the decision-making process driven by the analysis of benchmarking, suitable for quantitatively organize competitive analysis and choosing innovation targets; finally, we implemented the top-flop analysis in order to better improve the benchmarking implementation, identifying the best product on the market, basing on the highest number of innovative requirements owned by it, as shown by Frizziero in 2018 and Meuli et al. in 1997. The second part of the article focuses on the project of the kick scooter through the use of a software for the FEA simulation and on the possible realization of the prototype through a suitable connecting component.

BeiDou/GPS relative kinematic positioning in challenging environments including poor satellite visibility and high receiver velocity

Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite tracking loss always occurs under challenging observation conditions such as poor satellite visibility, high receiver velocity and so on. The announcement of China’s BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) regional service in 2012 has, on one hand, provided a new standalone positioning system and, on the other hand, augmented GPS under challenging observation conditions. This paper carries out BDS/GPS relative kinematic positioning with poor satellite visibility and high receiver velocity including an under-foliage pedestrian positioning at the speed of ∼5 km h−1, a city urban vehicle positioning at the speed of ∼30 km h−1, and an open-sky air vehicle positioning at the speed of ∼130 km h−1. Numerical results reveal that the standalone system cannot always provide reliable kinematic positioning solution in challenging observation environments. Instead, BDS/GPS combined system can provide better kinematic performance, i.e. 94.2% solution with 0.251 m precision (1-sigma) for the under-foliage pedestrian scenario and 97.0% solution with 0.151 m precision (1-sigma) for the city-urban vehicle scenario. As for the high receiver velocity case, both BDS and GPS can provide cm-level kinematic positioning precisions from the perspective of aerial photogrammetry. The BDS/GPS combined system cannot further improve the positioning availability and precision too much.

Reconfigurable Integrated Stability Control for Four- and Three-wheeled Urban Vehicles With Flexible Combinations of Actuation Systems

Small electric vehicles, also known as urban vehicles, have been introduced to alleviate traffic congestion, energy consumption, and pollution due to their smaller sizes, higher maneuverability, and lower fuel consumption. The main objective of this study is to develop a unified control structure that can be reconfigured for stability control of different configurations of urban vehicles with flexible combinations of control actuation. The reconfigurable controller can be readily adjusted for Tadpole and Delta three-wheeled vehicles as well as four-wheeled vehicles without reformulating the problem. Different types and combinations of actuators can be selected for the control design including differential braking, torque vectoring, active front and rear steering, and active camber system. The proposed structure integrates the lateral stability control, the rollover prevention, and the longitudinal slip control in traction/braking. The reconfigurable controller is developed using the model predictive control approach. Simulation results show that the introduced controller can be effectively used for stability control of different configurations of urban vehicles, and facilitates their control design.

ACCESS TO COMMUNICATION PLANNING AND TRANSPORTATION MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY IN ASSESSMENT OF VEHICLE OPERATIONS IN PEKANBARU CITY'S, RIAU, INDONESIA

Management of leasing vehicles contributes significantly to amount of transportation driving the supply of fiduciaries fiduciary progress on the streets in Pekanbaru cities, Indonesian state. This development was caused by poor public transport supplies, urban leasing vehicles with fiduciary patterns and poor roads. The use of fiduciary vehicles for public transport in the city of Pekanbaru, Riau, Indonesia is associated with a high level of accidents both on the side of drivers, drivers and passenger’s fiduciary vehicles. This study investigates the social-economic impact of Pekanbaru city's most likely drivers in the Regional Government areas Indonesian state. Questionnaires were given to samples randomly selected 200 users’ area. Of the 200 questionnaires given, 183 questionnaires were received for analysis using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). The findings show that the majority of commercial fiduciary riders are adults between the ages of 31 and 40 years. Most (72.9%) are married and have sufficient educations. Selected male sexes, 78.6% of the 66 respondents Company guarantees full-time fiduciary vehicles and has operated for more than four years with a general policy pattern. The majority of riders are involved in business because of the urgent need to survive and defend their families. In addition, most motorists do not take the necessary precautions, they are earning consumers and family management even during working hours and this reason has been identified as the main cause of their carelessness.

Study on Bogie Frame Reliability of Urban Railway Vehicles

The planning and design of the urban railway lines is an important part of the medium-distance railways, and the construction of the domestic urban railways is developed rapidly. As an important part of the urban railway, the rail vehicle has become one of the research and development priorities of the key enterprises. As the main load-bearing structure of railway vehicle bogies, the bogie frame reliability is crucial to the operational safety and service life of vehicles. In view of this, the reliability of the domestic newly designed urban vehicle bogie frame is analyzed based on UIC standards, which provides effective support for the design of urban vehicles.

Characterizing Urban Particulate Matter Vehicle Emission Spatial Distributions with On-Road Black Carbon and Particle Number Observations

Distributed urban emissions contribute to spatially variable air pollutant exposures from neighborhood block to city-wide scales. It is challenging to attribute fine particulate matter (PM-2.5) exp...

Study on Gasoline Vehicle Emission Inventory Considering Regional Differences in China

Rapid growth of China’s urban road vehicles, in particular, the increase in the number of gasoline vehicles, leads to an increase in the traffic congestion and problems pertaining to air pollution. The establishment of the emission inventory of gasoline vehicles is influenced by several factors, like environmental characteristics, vehicle conditions, road conditions, and so on. In order to obtain gasoline vehicle emission inventory in accordance with the actual situation in different regions, this study proposed a method of establishing a list of gasoline vehicles with regional differences. Comprehensive consideration and evaluation of various factors that affect the vehicle emissions were carried out and the corresponding correction factors were obtained. According to the formula of comprehensive emission factor for Zibo city, the emission inventory of gasoline vehicle was established. This method can be effectively utilized to obtain the emission inventory of gasoline vehicles in different cities more accurately and provide theoretical support for control strategies of gasoline vehicle emissions.

Vibration analysis to estimate turbocharger speed fluctuation in diesel engines

The optimum management of the engine system has a crucial role in order to achieve high efficiency and reduced pollutant emissions. Advanced methods have been proposed, in which several types of sensors are used to directly/indirectly sense the combustion and to provide a feedback signal to optimize the engine management.In turbocharged engines, it has been demonstrated that a relationship exists between the rotational speed of the turbocharger and the thermo-fluid dynamic condition of the gases at the exhaust valve opening. Such a relation allows to establish a link between the engine operating conditions in terms of speed, load and injection settings and the turbocharger speed.A research activity was performed aimed at developing a methodology in which the signal from an accelerometer mounted on the compressor housing was used to extract information about the turbocharger speed value. The activity was organized in two subsequent steps, each one focused on one specific objective:– estimation of the mean turbocharger rotational speed– evaluation of the turbocharger speed fluctuations.Tests were performed on a small displacement two-cylinder diesel engine mainly used in urban vehicles that was equipped with a turbocharger. The results obtained during the first step of activity demonstrated the opportunity of further investigations in order to compute the turbocharger speed fluctuation from the accelerometer signal processing. This paper is devoted to present the results of the second step of the research activity, with the final aim of realizing a non intrusive control of combustion process, in which the variation of combustion development as regards nominal condition is detected via the estimation of the turbocharger speed.

Experimental evaluation of model-based control strategies of sodium-nickel chloride battery plus supercapacitor hybrid storage systems for urban electric vehicles

This paper deals with hybrid energy storage system (HESS) management strategies, optimized for urban road electric vehicle applications. These new control strategies aim to extend battery pack durability by reducing charging/discharging current peaks by means of supercapacitors. The optimization is carried out with reference to the case study of a HESS composed of a high power unit, i.e. supercapacitor module plus a high energy unit, i.e. a battery pack, based on nickel-chloride ZEBRA (ZEolite Battery Research Africa) technology. On-board integration of the two storage devices is obtained through a DC/DC bidirectional power converter, as this configuration is particularly convenient for many kinds of urban vehicle operations. The novelty of this work consists in an analytical methodology, based on non-linear programming and calculus of variations theory, to evaluate management strategies characterized by high effectiveness in reducing battery current transients. The identification and optimization of these strategies are initially performed on the basis of a vehicle model, built in the Matlab-Simulink simulation environment. To this purpose, the experimental characterization of the supercapacitor module is obtained with reference to three different models, whose selection depends on the required fitting performance and computational effort indexes, as evaluated in the paper. The energy management strategies identified show promising results in the simulation environment, followed by experimental activities carried out by means of a dedicated 1:1 scale laboratory test bench. The various experimental results presented in this manuscript highlight that the identified λ-control strategy presents effectiveness values up to 57%, close to the ideal results obtained in the simulation environment. In fact, the methodology proposed in this paper, validated by laboratory experiments, definitely reduces the negative consequences of power peaks on the HESS, indicating the real possibility of using these results in the design and control of urban road vehicles.

The Impact of Autonomous Vehicles on Cities: A Review

ABSTRACTAutonomous vehicles (AVs) are starting to hit our roads. It is only a matter of time until the technological challenges still facing full AV implementation are solved, and legal, social, and transport issues related to AVs become part of the public discussion. AVs have the potential to become a major catalyst for urban transformation. To explore some of these transformations, first, we discuss the possibility of decoupling the many functions of urban vehicles from the form factor (without drivers, do cars need to look like they look today?). Second, we question whether AVs will lead to more or fewer cars on the roads, highlighting the synergies between AVs and ride-sharing schemes. Third, with AVs as part of multimodal and sharing-mobility systems, millions of square kilometers currently used for parking spaces might be liberated, or even change the way we design road space. Fourth, freed from the fatigue related to traffic, we question whether AVs would make people search for home locations farther from cities, increasing urban sprawl, or would rather attract more residents to city centers, also freed from congestion and pollution. Fifth, depending on responses to the previous questions and innovative traffic algorithms, we ask whether AVs will demand more or less road infrastructure. We conclude by suggesting that AVs offer the first opportunity to rethink urban life and city design since cars replaced horse-powered traffic and changed the design of cities for a hundred years.