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An influential factor in enhancing the attendance services, mainly in commercial and emergency sectors, is the vehicular technology used to transport people, goods, or equipment. Although hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) represent a sustainable transport alternative, the existing technical limitations such as battery and fuel capacities, and autonomy, among others, highlight the provision of an efficient automation tool. The tool can serve to enhance the operational performance of the HEV by selecting the proper driving mode (on fuel or electricity), and the navigation strategies to the delivery and charging points in urban areas. This paper proposes a two-stage methodology that allows the HEVs operators to automate the operational performance of a heterogeneous HEV fleet on a city map. Each stage is handled by its corresponding optimization model. In the first stage, the total navigation time and the battery lifetime of the fleet during the operation are optimized. In this stage, constraints related to charge-sustaining/charge-depleting modes, state of charge (SoC) of the HEVs battery, and deliveries schedules are taken into account. To this end, operating strategies related to the performance of different types of existing HEV technologies are anonymously considered. In the second stage, the best operating strategy among all the operating strategies is selected while considering the capacity of HEVs to deliver a given quantity of goods. Moreover, uncertainties during the HEV navigation are simulated considering the change in traffic density of the urban roads as a function of the levels of service (LOS). Results show that the proposed methodology establishes an efficient operational scheme for a HEVs fleet, ensuring a significant reduction of energy usage as well as mitigating the CO2 emissions.

In this paper, a mixed-integer linear programming model is proposed to optimize hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) navigation modes on the city map, namely the problem of the optimal selection of navigation modes (OSNMs). The OSNMs problem of the HEV as part of the operating strategy is obtained considering a constraint set related to CO 2 emissions reduction, efficient battery charging, and the optimal scheduling of deliveries. Uncertainties in the HEV navigation on urban roads are modeled using probability values assigned to an established set of traffic density values according to the levels of service. The model is implemented in a mathematical programming language (AMPL) and solved using the commercial solver CPLEX. The case study considers real data related to the Prius Prime technology and shows the effectiveness of automating the HEV navigation modes considering CO 2 emissions reduction levels during an operating strategy.