Inter-Stop Energy Prediction and Causal Driver Quantification for Dual-Source Trolleybuses via a Time-Aware Tabular Deep Learning Architecture
Dual-source trolleybuses alternate between overhead catenary supply and on-board battery operation, creating energy-use patterns driven by route attributes, high-frequency trajectories, and hourly weather. Existing models struggle to represent these heterogeneous inputs and rarely explain the causal drivers of consumption. This paper proposes a time-aware tabular deep learning framework for inter-stop energy management. Periodic time encoding is integrated into a parameter-efficient batch-ensemble backbone to jointly learn static and sequential features, while Bayesian optimization with tree-structured density estimation tunes hyperparameters. To move beyond prediction, a three-layer causal explanation pipeline combines feature attribution for marginal effects, a linear non-Gaussian acyclic model for causal direction discovery, and a meta-learner for net average treatment effects. Experiments on the Zurich trolleybus dataset enriched with meteorological records achieve a MAPE of 6.52% and R of 0.982, outperforming ten statistical, tree-ensemble, and deep learning baselines. Ablation results show that periodic time encoding contributes most to the accuracy gain. Causal analysis identifies regenerative braking ratio and average speed as the strongest energy-saving factors, while coasting distance is the main driver of excess consumption. The findings offer actionable thresholds for vehicle technology, driving behavior, capacity allocation, and catenary network planning.