A large-scale adoption of electric buses (EBs) is a promising solution to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector. In the upcoming decades, the development of EB technologies will be initiated worldwide, including in Malaysia. Government policies to support EB deployments have been widely established. Therefore, Malaysia’s National Automotive Policy has stated a roadmap of policies to promote a national groundwork accordingly. Following the elaboration of Malaysia’s goals for EBs deployments by 2014 and 2020, there are crucial associated topics for EBs implementation, including EB innovations and technologies adoption. This study presents a deep discussion about the groundwork of EB innovations that have been initiated in Malaysia to meet the roadmap targets. This paper also comprehensively reviews the technical specifications of EB innovation technologies, including Electric Bus Innovation Malaysia, Malaysia Automotive Institute, and Go Auto prototypes. In addition, this study outlines the EB technologies that have been launched in three states in Malaysia, known as Putrajaya, Melaka, and Sarawak. Furthermore, a generic framework for life cycle assessments of EB is presented, focusing on the economic and environmental impacts. This framework provides the necessary groundwork for further studies on charging infrastructure requirements.

Electric vehicles usage and adoption have expanded rapidly over the last decade, as the global energy demand is shifting away from fossil fuels. The recent development of electric vehicle charging technology, which is a fast charging mode, enables an electric vehicle to be fully charged within 10 minutes. However, the generated harmonics, control complexity, and cost of fast charging are the main challenges that need to be addressed to further expand the electric vehicle fast charging technologies. In this manuscript, a new electric vehicle fast charger was designed by introducing the three-stage converters based on the integration between internal model controller with synchronized decoupled controller algorithms. The proposed charger can provide two types of charging approaches, namely alternating current (AC) fast charging and direct current (DC) fast charging. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed charger, the model is developed and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink 2018a platform. Additionally, experimental verification, which utilizes a digital signal processor (TMS320F28335), is conducted to further support the design concept and the simulation findings. These research results have indicated that the proposed charger is applicable for fast AC and DC charging. Moreover, the total harmonic distortion value for the input current is 1.55%, where it has constantly been maintained within the standard limits, thus showing the effectiveness of proposed charger in performing the charging process without causing any significant impact to the grid.

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is considered as a global public health challenge. To contain this pandemic, different measures are being taken globally. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been represented as one of the most important schemes that has been considered to fight the spread of COVID-19 in the world, practically Malaysia. In fact, there are many sectors in Malaysia would be transformed into smart services by using IoT technologies, particularly energy, transportation, healthcare sectors. This manuscript presents a comprehensive review of the IoT technologies that are being used currently in Malaysia to accelerate the measures against COVID-19. These IoT technologies including smart thermal detection, surveillance network, and healthcare delivery technologies. In addition, the most potential IoT technologies developed by other nations to tackle COVID-19 are reviewed, including tracking and tracing systems based on IoT, adoption of IoT technologies in hospitals, and self-monitoring devices based on IoT. For these technologies to be incorporated in Malaysia, the main challenges with possible recommendations are discussed in this manuscript. Finally, this work proposes a conceptual framework to accelerate the battle pace with spread of COVID-19 in Malaysia by integrating IoT technologies used in fighting the outbreak of COVID-19 globally.