Joint Planning Cuts Electric Bus Fleets by Optimizing Routes and Charging Together
Researchers found that transit agencies can significantly reduce the number of buses needed by planning timetables, vehicle scheduling, and charging station placement simultaneously rather than sequentially. The discovery matters because it offers cities a concrete way to lower capital costs for electrifying bus fleets—a major hurdle in the shift away from diesel.
Originaltitel: Integrated solution for electric bus timetabling and vehicle scheduling combined with choices of charging locations
<p>This paper presents a novel mathematical model, integrating timetabling and vehicle scheduling problems for electric buses. The objective is to minimize the number of buses while satisfying constraints concerning routing and charging, including design choices for where to install charging stations. The aim of the paper is to illustrate and discuss the effects of solving the timetabling and vehicle scheduling of electric buses (including where to install charging infrastructure) separately, compared to solving them jointly in one single step. For that purpose, we perform tests with: i) given timetable, that is, solving only the vehicle scheduling problem, ii) fixed headways for each line, and iii) variable headways. A small test case based on actual bus lines from Va center dot stra Fro center dot lunda, Gothenburg, Sweden, is used. From the numerical experiments, we verify that combining the two planning steps can significantly reduce the number of vehicles needed.</p>