Design and testing of smart power sharing technologies for modular road transportation systems

The synergistic adoption of automated driving technologies and the electrification of the vehicle powertrain offer the possibility of proposing new and innovative solutions for public transportation systems. In particular, an interesting solution is represented by modular systems in which multiple autonomous vehicles/transportation modules can be aggregated to form reconfigurable compositions according to the desired transportation demand. In this work, a configurable connection between vehicles is adopted, as convoying ensures the possibility of power sharing between vehicles, allowing coordinated power management throughout the composition. Connected vehicles can also share power between batteries for battery recharging, which is performed using a custom solution from a tram-like catenary. In this work, the authors design a demonstrator to investigate the feasibility of the proposed solution. Once designed, the proposed system has been assembled and tested at the ENEA Casaccia Research Center, preliminarily validating it.