MILP model for fleet and charging infrastructure decisions for fast-charging city electric bus services

Abstract

The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is one of required conditions for the transition to the sustainable cities. The creation of sustainable public transportation system is seen as an efcient long-term solution to achieve it. This paper develops a framework for designing a sustainable infrastructure for fast-charging electric buses. This framework helps the decision makers and in particular public authorities to determine a heterogeneous fleet of electric buses, to design the network of required charging facilities and to maximize the flow of passengers utilizing sustainable public transportation to minimize the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. An efcient Mixed Integer Linear Programming model is developed for the particular case where all chargers are interchangeable among the electrical buses. The decision-making process is illustrated through a case study for the public bus transportation in the city of Minsk. Extensive computer experiments show that the developed model provides efcient solutions in acceptable computational time and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on every tested problem instance.