In the upcoming decades, connected vehicles will join regular vehicles to appear on roads, and the characteristics of traffic flow will be changed accordingly. To model the heterogeneous traffic mixing regular and connected vehicles, a generic car-following framework is first proposed in this paper. A linear stability condition is theoretically derived, which indicates that the stability of the heterogeneous traffic is closely related to the penetration rate and the spatial distribution of connected vehicles. The generic car-following framework is applied by taking the Intelligent Driver Model as an example, and it is shown that connected vehicles can obviously enhance the stability of traffic flow and improve traffic efficiency in particular when traffic is in congestion. Moreover, a driver assistance strategy based on distributed feedback control is developed for connected vehicles, and the simulation results show that the proposed driver assistance strategy performs satisfactorily in stabilizing traffic as well as improving traffic efficiency.

To address sustainable development issues of urban traffic, electric buses will join traditional bus system, and the scheduling of bus fleet should be adjusted due to the distinct features of electric buses. To this end, this paper develops a Multi-objective Bi-level programming model to collaboratively optimize the vehicle scheduling and charging scheduling of the mixed bus fleet under the operating conditions of a single depot. The upper level determines the vehicle scheduling to minimize the operating cost and carbon emissions under the constraints of connecting time between trips and the limited driving range of electric buses. The lower level is a charging scheduling problem that considers the charging time and the limited driving distance constraint to minimize the charging cost. The proposed model is solved with an integrated heuristic algorithm. The vehicle scheduling problem is addressed with the iterative neighborhood search algorithm based on simulated annealing, while the charging scheduling problem is solved with a greedy dynamic selection strategy based on the approach of multi-stage decision. Finally, case study is carried out based on a mixed bus fleet in Beijing, and the results validate the availability of the proposed model and solution algorithm.

The ever-increasing concerns over urban air quality, noise pollution, and considerable savings in total cost of ownership encouraged more and more cities to introduce battery electric buses (e-bus). Based on the sensor records of 99 e-buses that included over 250,000 h across 4.7 million kilometers, this paper unveiled the relationship between driving behaviors and e-bus battery energy consumption under various environments. Battery efficiency was evaluated by the distance traveled per unit battery energy (1% SoC, State of Charge). Mix effect regression was applied to quantify the magnitude and correlation between multiple factors; and 13 machine learning methods were adopted for enhanced prediction and optimization. Although regenerative braking could make a positive contribution to e-bus battery energy recovery, unstable driving styles with greater speed variation or acceleration would consume more energy, hence reduce the battery efficiency. The timing window is another significant factor and the result showed higher efficiency at night, over weekends, or during cooler seasons. Assuming a normal driving behavior, this paper investigated the most economical driving speed in order to maximize battery efficiency. An average of 19% improvement could be achieved, and the optimal driving speed is time-dependent, ranging from 11 to 18 km/h.

This paper studies traffic features in a mixed traffic flow composed of motorized vehicles and nonmotorized vehicles near a bus stop within a completely different framework. Our work has taken the nonlane based behaviors of nonmotorized vehicles into account, which has seldom been considered in previous works. We have investigated flow rates as well as passenger transport capacity of the system. The traffic state diagram and the spatiotemporal pattern are presented as the inflow rates of motorized vehicles and nonmotorized vehicles change. A nonmonotonic change of passenger transport capacity is also identified at specific parameters. The influence of parameters such as stopped time of buses is discussed. These results are expected to shed some light on the management and design of urban mixed traffic systems.