A Vehicle Device Tailored for Hybrid Trolleybuses and Overhead Wires Implementation in SUMO

Abstract

The electrification of transport is one of the key parts of the present aim to reduce undesirable vehicular emissions in the atmosphere. While the full electrification of personal vehicles is mostly associated with employing a big battery pack on the board and charging on (static) charging stations, another interesting possibility appears in the case of public transport – dynamic drawing of the power from overhead wires. Regarding vehicles moving on the road, this concept is used by trolleybuses or hybrid trolleybuses, i.e. vehicles combining power from the overhead wires and batteries. A replacement of classic buses (with a combustion engine) with (hybrid) trolleybuses is hardly possible without an appropriate adjustment of public transport lines and the necessary infrastructure. For this purpose, a simulation of the adjusted public transport service may be used to identify weaknesses of the proposed solution. This paper presents a new vehicle device and a new additional part of road infrastructure in SUMO. It introduces device.elecHybrid based on existing device.battery, extending its functionality and tailoring it for the needs of hybrid trolleybuses. In addition, overhead wires and traction substations are implemented. As the voltage and electric currents in the overhead wires depend on traffic, the overhead wire parameters are optionally evaluated by a built-in electric circuit solver using Kirchhoff’s laws. The proposed changes allow us to simulate hybrid trolleybus in-motion charging under the overhead wire. The extensions can be immediately used in micro-simulations or even (in a simplified version) in the meso-simulation mode.