Abstract
Bus operators around the world are facing the transformation of their fleets from fossil-fuelled to electric buses. Two technologies prevail: Depot charging and opportunity charging at terminal stops. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is an important metric for the decision between the two technologies; however, most TCO studies for electric bus systems rely on generalised route data and simplifying assumptions that may not reflect local conditions. In particular, the need to reschedule vehicle operations to satisfy electric buses’ range and charging time constraints is commonly disregarded. We present a simulation tool based on discrete-event simulation to determine the vehicle, charging infrastructure, energy and staff demand required to electrify real-world bus networks. These results are then passed to a TCO model. A greedy scheduling algorithm is developed to plan vehicle schedules suitable for electric buses. Scheduling and simulation are coupled with a genetic algorithm to determine cost-optimised charging locations for opportunity charging. A case study is carried out in which we analyse the electrification of a metropolitan bus network consisting of 39 lines with 4748 passenger trips per day. The results generally favour opportunity charging over depot charging in terms of TCO; however, under some circumstances, the technologies are on par. This emphasises the need for a detailed analysis of the local bus network in order to make an informed procurement decision.
Highlights
Municipal governments and public transport operators around the world have committed to transforming their fossil-fuelled bus fleets to zero-emission fleets, using either battery electric or fuel cell electric buses
The majority of bus electrification projects focuses on depot charging (DC) and opportunity charging at terminal stops (OC-T)
Our scheduling algorithm can plan schedules for depot charging (DC) and opportunity charging at terminal stops (OC-T)
Summary
Municipal governments and public transport operators around the world have committed to transforming their fossil-fuelled bus fleets to zero-emission fleets, using either battery electric or fuel cell electric buses. Many works circumvent the problem of rescheduling bus operations to satisfy the range and charging time constraints imposed by electric buses. This can lead to unrealistic results for the electric bus fleet size. We apply the charging infrastructure optimisation and scheduling algorithms to construct fully electrified operational scenarios using depot and opportunity charging. The resulting vehicle schedules serve as input for a fleet and depot simulation that yields fleet size, fleet energy consumption, driver hours, etc These values are fed into the TCO module to obtain total system cost for each scenario.
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