| Long-term and large scale investment planning decisions in two interdependent infrastructures, energy and transportation, will have increasingly overarching impacts on each other, due to rising interdependencies between the two systems such as plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and hybrid electric trains. Motivated by this interdependency, the National Energy and Transportation Planning Tool (NETPLAN) is developed. A benchmarking methodology is designed and then executed in order to compare the developing software with MARKAL and TIMES, which are existing investment planning tools that expand beyond one sector and are most closely related to the scope of NETPLAN. The designed stages of the benchmarking approach involve the philosophy, the model, and the mathematical formulation, and a case study is conducted in MARKAL using a consistent set of data that was used in NETPLAN. Results are obtained and then compared, and it is demonstrated how the interdependency between energy and transportation affects the investment decisions in NETPLAN. |
