On the Use of Agile Optimization for Efficient Energy Consumption in Smart Cities’s Transportation and Mobility

Abstract

Urban logistics consumes a large portion of energy resources worldwide. Thus, optimization algorithms are used to define mobility modes, vehicle fleets, routing plans, and last-mile delivery operations to reduce energy consumption such as metaheuristics. With the emergence of smart cities, new opportunities were defined, such as carsharing and ridesharing. In addition to last-mile delivery, these opportunities form a challenging problem because of the dynamism they possess. New orders or ride requests could be placed or canceled at any time. Further, transportation times might evolve due to traffic conditions. These dynamic changes challenge traditional optimization methods to propose solutions in real-time to large-scale energy-optimization problems. Thus, a more `agile optimization’ approach is required to provide fast solutions to optimization problems when these changes occur. Agile optimization combines biased randomization and parallelism. It provides `good’ solutions compared to solutions found by traditional optimization methods, such as in-team orienteering problems. Additionally, these solutions are found in short wall clock, real-time.

Keywords

• smart cities
• carsharing
• ridesharing
• last-mile delivery
• efficient energy consumption
• sustainability