Rashid A. Waraich

Integrating Power Systems, Transport Systems and Vehicle Technology for Electric Mobility Impact Assessment and Efficient Control

Electric mobility is considered as a promising option for future individual transportation in terms of lower CO2-emissions and reduced dependence on fossil fuels. In order to analyze its impacts effectively, an agent based model is proposed. It integrates three domains which are mainly affected by electric mobility. Vehicle fleet evolution and vehicle energy demand simulations are combined with a transportation simulation, thus determining the daily behavior of electric vehicles and providing individual battery energy levels at the different locations of the vehicles during the day. Further, a power system model combined with a charging control algorithm is included in order to study general effects in electricity networks and to provide insights into new electric vehicle load patterns, as well as into changes in transport behavior. It is shown that network congestion can be mitigated using control signals. The paper describes the method and the integration of the three different domains and shows results of the integrated analysis tool.

Agent-Based Parking Choice Model

Parking choice is an essential part of individual transportation; however, many travel demand and traffic simulations do not include parking. This paper reports on a proposal for a simple parking model and describes how this model was implemented into an existing, agent-based traffic simulation. The parking model provides feedback to the traffic simulation so that the overall simulation can react to spatial differences in parking demand and supply. Simulation results of a scenario in the city of Zürich, Switzerland, demonstrated that the model could capture key elements of parking, including capacity and pricing, and could assist with designing parking-focused transport policies. The paper also discusses possible work, such as microsimulation of the search for large-scale parking.

An agent-based cellular automaton cruising-for-parking simulation

Abstract This paper reports on the development of an agent-based cruising-for-parking simulation using the cellular automaton (CA) approach. The software was tested on a small-scale scenario, and a first verification step was performed for a real-world scenario for the town center of Zürich. Approaches to integrating the simulation into MATSim, a multi-agent transport simulation program, are discussed. The software is open source and can be downloaded from a free software repository. Empirical data that may be valuable for future model calibration are currently being surveyed in a global positioning system (GPS) study at the authors’ institute.

On the interdependence of intelligent charging approaches for plug-in electric vehicles in transmission and distribution networks

This paper proposes a novel approach to assess the impact of different plug-in electric vehicle charging strategies on power generation, transmission and distribution. The proposed impact assessment tool integrates simulations of transport behavior as well as power generation, transmission and distribution. The detailed temporal and spatial information of vehicle behavior obtained from the transport simulation is mapped to the transmission and distribution network models to perform a holistic assessment of the impact of different charging strategies. The charging strategies considered are uncontrolled charging and two types of smart charging schemes, one centralized the other decentralized. The advantage of this integrated approach is that both local and system-wide aspects can be analyzed simultaneously, uncovering effects that would otherwise remain unnoticed.

Performance improvements for large-scale traffic simulation in MATSim

In contrast to aggregated macroscopic models of traffic simulation, multi-agent microscopic models, such as MATSim, enable modeling of individual behavior and facilitate more detailed traffic analysis. However, such detailed modeling also leads to an increased computational burden, such that simulation performance becomes critical.