On the impact of co-optimizing station locations, trip assignment, and charging schedules for electric buses

Authors

Rito Brata Nath
Tarun Rambha
Maximilian Schiffer

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2024

Subject Area

mode - bus, technology - alternative fuels, operations - scheduling, infrastructure - fleet management, infrastructure - station, economics - operating costs, planning - methods

Keywords

electric buses, fleet management, charging

Abstract

As many public transportation systems around the world transition to electric buses, the planning and operation of fleets can be improved via tailored decision-support tools. In this work, we study the impact of jointly locating charging facilities, assigning electric buses to trips, and determining when and where to charge the buses. We propose a mixed integer linear program that co-optimizes planning and operational decisions jointly and an iterated local search heuristic to solve large-scale instances. Herein, we use a concurrent scheduler algorithm to generate an initial feasible solution, which serves as a starting point for our iterated local search algorithm. In the sequential case, we first optimize trip assignments and charging locations. Charging schedules are then determined after fixing the optimal decisions from the first level. The joint model, on the other hand, integrates charge scheduling within the local search procedure. The solution quality of the joint and sequential iterated local search models are compared for multiple real-world bus transit networks. Our results demonstrate that joint models can help further improve operating costs by 14.1% and lower total costs by about 4.1% on average compared with sequential models. In addition, energy consumption costs and contracted power capacity costs have been reduced significantly due to our integrated planning approach.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

Comments

Transportation Research Part C Home Page:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0968090X

Recommended Citation

Nath, R.B., Rambha, T., & Schiffer, M. (2024). On the impact of co-optimizing station locations, trip assignment, and charging schedules for electric buses. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 167, 104839.