Low Carbon Transitions of Fleet Operations in Metropolitan Sites (LC TRANSFORMS)

The rapid urbanisation and increase in vehicle use in East Asia has created substantial environmental and social problems. In the UK, urban transport systems face similar issues, but generally at a smaller scale and at a much lower pace. However, a strong built-in inertia within physical, regulatory and societal infrastructure in western urban systems makes this challenging to tackle. Low carbon vehicle fleets for personal mobility and freight have the potential to contribute to reduction of the climate impact from urban transport as well as to improve local traffic and air quality conditions. The extent of this potential is however still unclear. Ample uncertainties remain regarding both the demand for fleet services and the most effective way to organise fleet operations, especially in the case of electric vehicles where interaction with the power grid becomes a critical issue. At the same time, a range of new business models for the operation urban freights and fleet services are emerging, enabled by pervasive ICT.

Against this background, the overall aim of the LC TRANSFORMS project is to provide an integrated planning and deployment strategy for multi-purpose low carbon fleets and enabling urban infrastructure and to devise operational business models ensuring economic viability and environmental effectiveness.

This aim will be attained by addressing 4 key research challenges:
1) Transport demand and network modelling tools for low carbon transport planning in urban areas have been outpaced by practical innovation in real-world urban transport and need to be brought up to speed. In particular, better integration is needed between urban mobility and freight modelling on the demand side (e.g. to capture substitution of shopping trips by home deliveries) and on the operations side (e.g. accounting for electric passenger and freight vehicles sharing a common charging infrastructure). Further improvement areas include representation of kerb space as a scarce and constrained resource affecting parking and loading operations of vehicle fleets, and better characterisation of fleet service customer heterogeneity (necessary for demand flexibility exploitation);
2) The new business models in urban fleet operation, in particular those operating in "demand responsive" modes and exploiting demand flexibility require the development of new operational management algorithms that ensure high quality of service, economic and environmental performances. This is particularly challenging in electric fleet operation where patterns of consumption of fleet services (freight and personal mobility), need to accommodate electric vehicle charging operations, when time-dependent prices of electricity and grid emissions factors are low.
3) The large scale deployment of electric fleets will pose challenges for the intelligent management of networked infrastructure for optimal operation of commercial fleets is largely understudied. This is true for intelligent transport infrastructure to optimise traffic management as well as the requirements of charging infrastructure and of smart charging algorithms to optimise environmental and economic benefits which have not been studied in detail for commercial for commercial fleets.
4) For scale investments to flow into low carbon transport, there is also a need for a new generation of policy appraisal tools that can deal with the interdependencies among networked urban infrastructures, (transport, power and IT). Such tools must take account not only of technical and functional interdependencies but also of the existence of multiple institutional stakeholders and of the substantial uncertainties affecting the flow of costs and benefits to different stakeholder over different time horizons. Consolidation of isolated initiatives to extend existing appraisal techniques, e.g. by the integration of ideas from Real Options Theory are required.

LC TRANSFORMS will provide a strategic direction for the decarbonisation of fleets in cites and deliver methodologies and techniques for enabling multi-stakeholder decision making and business models to facilitate this transition in a cost effective way. LC TRANSFORMS research will have broad benefit for industry, public authorities and citizens. Specific beneficiaries and why they would benefit from this research are detailed as follows.

Urban transport industry: the urban logistics companies, urban transit operators, tax and car-sharing operators will benefit from the new tools that will be developed in LC TRANSFORMS to improve the economical and environmental performance of their operations.

Manufacturing industry: Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) who have interest in electric and low carbon vehicles markets in the UK and China will benefit from the new markets opportunities that will open in from low carbon fleets deployment that will be enabled by the successful deployment strategies that LC TRANSFORMS aim to achieve.

Power industry: e.g. charging infrastructure developers, electricity network operators. The power and charging infrastructure industries need to know the likely demands on their infrastructures and the business cases and business models to inform on investment in new infrastructure. In a sense this is the key to sustainable roll-out as if the infrastructure is not in place and adequate the purchasing of electric fleet vehicles will be hindered.

Cities' government agencies: e.g. the Greater London Authorities, Transport for London, Beijing, Wuxi City Authority and the North East Combined Authority. Cities in UK and China are at the forefront to address the global challenge of carbon reduction, while they have obvious interests in solutions for better quality of urban transport services, local pollution and traffic.

Central government agencies: e.g. DECC, DfT, BIS, OLEV (UK) and Ministry of Science and Technology (China). Low Carbon Cities is on the strategic agenda of many government departments.

Citizens: will benefit from the generation of roadmaps to scale-up low carbon fleet to larger city-wide deployments making an effective impact on local pollution, traffic and quality of the public transit and urban logistic services.