Chemical Reaction Optimization for Electric Bus Scheduling

Abstract

In recent years the usage of electric buses in cities for the purpose of public transportation is increasing. Therefore, the solutions for the problems of the application of electric buses should be proposed. In this paper, we deal with one of the problems which rises during the establishment of the public transport system based on electric buses, specifically the electric bus scheduling problem. In this problem, we assign available buses to the service trips and charging in order to minimize the needed electric buses. We propose the solution to this problem by a metaheuristic algorithm Chemical Reaction Optimization (CRO) with the suggestion of the specific methods that can be used in the implementation of the algorithm for this specific problem. A number of tests were performed with the proposed algorithm on datasets from the public transport system in the city of Žilina. We list the obtained results and compare them to the solutions of the previously presented mathematical model.