A Vehicle and Charging Scheduling Framework for Campus Shuttle Electric Buses

Abstract

Electric buses (e-buses) are one of the promising drivers of the transition towards electrified public transportation to facilitate efficient and environmentally friendly mobility. In this regard, several universities across the globe are deploying e-buses for their campus shuttle services. However, enabling reliable and cost-effective operation of e-bus fleets is a complex task, mainly due to the limited driving range and charging costs of the vehicles. In this work, we propose a vehicle and charging scheduling framework to enable cost-optimal and feasible operation of campus shuttle electric buses. First, we develop a three-stage multi-depot vehicle scheduling problem (VSP) to allocate the trips to e-buses such that the daily energy requirement per each bus is levelized. Then, we introduce a charging scheduling problem (CSP) to minimize the electricity cost of charging, which consists of demand and time-of-use energy charges. Numerical case studies on the shuttle bus network of National University of Singapore reveal that the charging costs can be decreased by up to 63.33% when compared to an overnight charging strategy. Furthermore, with the proposed approach, it is found out that the average battery degradation of e-bus fleet is reduced by up to 11.78%.