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

东亚的快速城市化和车辆使用的增加造成了大量的环境和社会问题。在英国，城市交通系统也面临着类似的问题，但通常规模较小，速度也慢得多。然而，西方城市系统的物理、监管和社会基础设施中存在强烈的内在惯性，这使得解决这一问题具有挑战性。用于个人出行和货运的低碳车队有可能有助于减少城市交通对气候的影响，并改善当地的交通和空气质量状况。然而，这种潜力的程度仍不清楚。对于车队服务的需求和组织车队运营的最有效方式仍然存在很大的不确定性，特别是在电动汽车与电网的互动成为关键问题的情况下。与此同时，在无处不在的信息通信技术的推动下，城市货运和车队服务运营的一系列新商业模式正在出现。在此背景下，LC TRANSFORMS项目的总体目标是为多用途低碳车队和城市基础设施提供综合规划和部署策略，并设计确保经济可行性和环境有效性的运营商业模式。这一目标将通过解决4个关键的研究挑战来实现：1)城市地区低碳交通规划的交通需求和网络建模工具已经被现实世界城市交通的实际创新所超越，需要加快速度。特别是，城市交通和货运模型之间需要更好地整合，在需求方面（例如，用送货上门来代替购物）和在运营方面（例如，考虑到电动客运和货运车辆共享一个共同的充电基础设施）。进一步改善的范畴包括把路边空间视为影响车队泊车及装货的稀缺及受限制资源，以及更好地描述车队服务客户的异质性（这是利用需求灵活性所必需的）；2)城市车队运营的新商业模式，特别是那些以“需求响应”模式运营和利用需求灵活性的模式，需要开发新的运营管理算法，以确保高质量的服务、经济和环境绩效。这在电动车队运营中尤其具有挑战性，因为车队服务的消费模式（货运和个人移动）需要适应电动汽车充电操作，而电力价格与时间相关，电网排放因素较低。3)电动车队的大规模部署将对商用车队优化运行的网络化基础设施的智能管理提出挑战。对于优化交通管理的智能交通基础设施，以及优化环境和经济效益的充电基础设施和智能充电算法的要求都是如此，这些都没有在商业车队中进行详细的研究。4)为了使大规模投资流入低碳交通，还需要新一代政策评估工具，这些工具可以处理网络化城市基础设施（交通、电力和IT）之间的相互依赖关系。这些工具不仅必须考虑到技术和功能上的相互依赖关系，而且还必须考虑到多个机构利益攸关方的存在，以及在不同时间范围内影响成本和利益流向不同利益攸关方的重大不确定性。需要整合孤立的计划以扩展现有的评估技术，例如通过整合实物期权理论的思想。

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.