A Quantitative and Systematic Methodology to Investigate Energy Consumption in Multimodal Transportation Systems

Energy issues in transportation systems have garnered increasing attention in recent years in both the public and private sectors. This study proposes a systematic methodology for policy-makers to improve energy consumption efficiency in multimodal intercity transportation systems considering suppliers’ operational constraints and travelers’ mobility requirements. A bi-level optimization model is developed for this purpose and considers the air, rail, private auto, and transit modes. The upper level model is a mixed integer nonlinear program that aims to minimize energy consumption subject to transportation suppliers’ operational constraints and the traffic demand distribution to paths resulting from the lower level model. The lower level model is a linear program that seeks to maximize the intercity trip utilities of travelers. The interactions between the multimodal transportation suppliers and intercity traffic demand are considered under the goal of minimizing energy consumption at the system level. The proposed bi-level mixed integer nonlinear model is relaxed and transformed into a mathematical program with complimentarity constraints, and solved using a customized branch-and-bound algorithm. Numerical experiments, conducted using multimodal travel options between Lafayette, Indiana and Washington, D.C. reiterate that shifting traffic demand from private cars to the transit and rail modes can significantly reduce energy consumption. More importantly, the proposed methodology is able to provide quantitative analyses for system energy consumption and traffic demand distribution among transportation modes under specific policy instruments. The results also illustrate the need to systematically incorporate the interactions between traveler preferences, network structure, and supplier operational schemes to provide policy-makers insights for developing traffic demand shift mechanisms to minimize system energy consumption. Hence, the proposed methodology can provide policy-makers the ability to analyze energy consumption in the transportation sector under different policy instruments.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADC70 Transportation Energy. Alternate title: Quantitative and Systematic Methodology to Investigate Energy Consumption in Multimodal Transportation Systems.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Du, Lili
  • Peeta, Srinivas
  • Wei, Peng
  • Sun, Dengfeng
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Energy consumption; Mobility; Multimodal transportation; Policy making; Quantitative analysis; Systematics; Travel demand
• Geographic Terms: Lafayette (Indiana); Washington (District of Columbia)
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Energy; Highways; Public Transportation; Railroads; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01506342
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-3996
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 3 2014 9:17AM