Consolidating Bus Charger Deployment and Fleet Management for Public Transit Electrification: A Life-Cycle Cost Analysis Framework

Despite rapid advances in urban transit electrification, the progress of systematic planning and management of the electric bus (EB) fleet is falling behind. In this research, the fundamental issues affecting the nascent EB system are first reviewed, including charging station deployment, battery sizing, bus scheduling, and life-cycle analysis. At present, EB systems are planned and operated in a sequential manner, with bus scheduling occurring after the bus fleet and infrastructure have been deployed, resulting in low resource utilization or waste. We propose a mixed-integer programming model to consolidate charging station deployment and bus fleet management with the lowest possible life-cycle costs (LCCs), consisting of ownership, operation, maintenance, and emissions expenses, thereby narrowing the gap between optimal planning and operations. A tailored branch-and-price approach is further introduced to reduce the computational effort required for finding optimal solutions. Analytical results of a real-world case show that, compared with the current bus operational strategies and charging station layout, the LCC of one bus line can be decreased significantly by 30.4%. The proposed research not only performs life-cycle analysis but also provides transport authorities and operators with reliable charger deployment and bus schedules for single- and multi-line services, both of which are critical requirements for decision support in future transit systems with high electrification penetration, helping to accelerate the transition to sustainable mobility

Optimal charging plan for electric bus considering time-of-day electricity tariff

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to develop an optimization method for charging plans with the implementation of time-of-day (TOD) electricity tariff, to reduce electricity bill. Design/methodology/approach: Two optimization models for charging plans respectively with fixed and stochastic trip travel times are developed, to minimize the electricity costs of daily operation of an electric bus. The charging time is taken as the optimization variable. The TOD electricity tariff is considered, and the energy consumption model is developed based on real operation data. An optimal charging plan provides charging times at bus idle times in operation hours during the whole day (charging time is 0 if the bus is not get charged at idle time) which ensure the regular operation of every trip served by this bus. Findings: The electricity costs of the bus route can be reduced by applying the optimal charging plans. Originality/value: This paper produces a viable option for transit agencies to reduce their operation costs

Plant Phenotyping on Mobile Devices

Plants phenotyping is a fast and non-destructive method to obtain the physiological features of plants, compared with the expensive and time costing chemical analysis with plant sampling. Through plant phenotyping, scientists and farmers can tell plant health status more accurately compared to visual inspection, thus avoid the waste in time and resources and even to predict the productivity. However, the size and price of current plant phenotyping equipment restrict them from being widely applied at a farmer’s household level. Everyday field operation is barely achieved because of the availability of easy-to-carry and cost-effective equipment such as hyper-spectrum cameras, infrared cameras and thermal cameras. A plant phenotyping tool on mobile devices will make plant phenotyping technology more accessible to ordinary farmers and researchers. This application incorporates the use of physical optics, plant science models, and image processing ability of smartphones. With our special optical design, multispectral instead of RGB (red, green and blue) images can be obtained from the smartphones with fairly low cost. Through quick image processing on the smartphones, the APP will provide accurate plant physiological features predictions such as water, chlorophyll, and nitrogen. The sophisticated prediction models are applied which are provided by the Purdue’s plant phenotyping team. Once widely adopted, the information collected by the smartphones with the developed APP will be sent back to Purdue’s plant health big-data database. The feedback will not only allow us to improve our models, but also provide farmers and agricultural researchers easy access to real-time crop plant health data

Two families of linear codes with desirable properties from some functions over finite fields

Linear codes are widely studied in coding theory as they have nice applications in distributed storage, combinatorics, lattices, cryptography and so on. Constructing linear codes with desirable properties is an interesting research topic. In this paper, based on the augmentation technique, we present two families of linear codes from some functions over finite fields. The first family of linear codes is constructed from monomial functions over finite fields. The locality of them is determined and the weight distributions of two subfamilies of the codes are also given. An infinite family of locally recoverable codes which are at least almost optimal and some optimal recoverable codes are obtained from the linear codes. In particular, the two subfamilies of the codes are proved to be both optimally or almost optimally extendable and self-orthogonal. The second family of linear codes is constructed from weakly regular bent functions over finite fields and their weight distribution is determined. This family of codes is proved to have locality 3 for some cases and is conjectured to have locality 2 for other cases. Particularly, two families of optimal locally recoverable codes are derived from the linear codes. Besides, this family of codes is also proved to be both optimally or almost optimally extendable and self-orthogonal.Comment: 44 page

Trip energy consumption estimation for electric buses

This study aims to develop a trip energy consumption (TEC) estimation model for the electric bus (EB) fleet planning, operation, and life-cycle assessment. Leveraging the vast variations of temperature in Jilin Province, China, real-world data of 31 ​EBs operating in 14 months were collected with temperatures fluctuating from −27.0 ​to 35.0 ​\ub0C. TEC of an EB was divided into two parts, which are the energy required by the traction and battery thermal management system, and the energy required by the air conditioner (AC) system operation, respectively. The former was regressed by a logarithmic linear model with ambient temperature, curb weight, travel distance, and trip travel time as contributing factors. The optimum working temperature and regression parameters were obtained by combining Fibonacci and Weighted Least Square. The latter was estimated by the operation time of the AC system in cooling mode or heating mode. Model evaluation and sensitivity analysis were conducted. The results show that: (i) the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of the proposed model is 12.108%; (ii) the estimation accuracy of the model has a probability of 99.7814% meeting the requirements of EB fleet scheduling; (iii) the MAPE has a 1.746% reduction if considering passengers’ boarding and alighting

Neural Super-Resolution for Real-time Rendering with Radiance Demodulation

Rendering high-resolution images in real-time applications (e.g., video games, virtual reality) is time-consuming, thus super-resolution technology becomes more and more crucial in real-time rendering. However, it is still challenging to preserve sharp texture details, keep the temporal stability and avoid the ghosting artifacts in the real-time rendering super-resolution. To this end, we introduce radiance demodulation into real-time rendering super-resolution, separating the rendered image or radiance into a lighting component and a material component, due to the fact that the light component tends to be smoother than the rendered image and the high-resolution material component with detailed textures can be easily obtained. Therefore, we perform the super-resolution only on the lighting component and re-modulate with the high-resolution material component to obtain the final super-resolution image. In this way, the texture details can be preserved much better. Then, we propose a reliable warping module by explicitly pointing out the unreliable occluded regions with a motion mask to remove the ghosting artifacts. We further enhance the temporal stability by designing a frame-recurrent neural network to aggregate the previous and current frames, which better captures the spatial-temporal correlation between reconstructed frames. As a result, our method is able to produce temporally stable results in real-time rendering with high-quality details, even in the highly challenging 4 $\times$ 4 super-resolution scenarios