Tool based Assessment of Electromobility in Urban Logistics
Hoerstebrock, Tim and Hahn, Axel and Sauer, Jürgen
Soft Computing for Business Intelligence
Compared to conventional vehicles with combustion engines, electric vehicles have several advantages concerning sustainability and efficiency. Unfortunately, these advantages are bound to low ranges of the vehicles and long charging times due to the battery as energy source. In addition, the expensive battery increase the investment cost of the vehicle. In case of private users, these costs cannot be amortized by the relatively low electricity price due to the low utilizations of the vehicle. Car sharing could be a possible answer to deploy electric cars in urban re-gions nevertheless. The objective of our research is to assess the feasibility of ex-changing conventional vehicles through electric powered ones within a car sharing fleet. The goals of this analysis are to determine possible exchange rates of the ve-hicles, to specify the required charging infrastructure and to evaluate the effect on the quality of service in terms of availability of the vehicles. In order to achieve these goals, we developed a multi-agent framework that simulates vehicles with new drive systems in existing transportations systems in general and the potential of electromobility in existing road networks in particular. In this chapter, we ex-plain our approach and evaluate the feasibility of electric vehicles in a particular car sharing fleet operating in the city of Oldenburg, Germany. We evaluate two customer patterns: working day and weekend. The results show that the weekend scenario leads to several fuel shortages – in contrast to the working day scenario. The findings indicate that a more intelligent booking system or a quantitative ex-pansion of charging stations would lead to a higher reliability and user acceptance.
01 / 2013
inbook
Springer
Studies of Computational Intelligence
379-395
Espin Andrade, Rafael Alejandro; Bello Pérez, Rafael; Cobo, Angel; Marx Gomez, Jorge
