Abstract
Electric buses (e-buses) demonstrate great potential in improving urban air quality thanks to zero tailpipe emissions and thus being increasingly introduced to the public transportation systems. In the transit operation planning, a common requirement is that long-distance non-service travel of the buses among bus terminals should be avoided in the schedule as it is not cost-effective. In addition, e-buses should begin and end a day of operation at their base depots. Based on the unique route configurations in Shenzhen, the above two requirements add further constraint to the form of feasible schedules and make the e-bus scheduling problem more difficult. We call these two requirements the vehicle relocation constraint. This paper addresses a multi-depot e-bus scheduling problem considering the vehicle relocation constraint and partial charging. A mixed integer programming model is formulated with the aim to minimize the operational cost. A Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) heuristic is devised with novel destroy-and-repair operators to tackle the vehicle relocation constraint. Numerical experiments are conducted based on multi-route operation cases in Shenzhen to verify the model and effectiveness of the LNS heuristic. A few insights are derived on the decision of battery capacity, charging rate and deployment of the charging infrastructure.
Highlights
Buses account for only a small number of all the vehicles on city roads, but their emissions take up a much higher portion of the total road emissions owing to their long operation time and distance [1]
The e-bus operation scenario we considered in Shenzhen has the unique route configuration and operational requirements which we named as the vehicle relocation constraint
Based on the aforementioned considerations, with the aim to generate applicable e-bus schedules in Shenzhen involving multi-depot, vehicle relocation constraint and partial charging, this paper developed an Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) heuristic which can effectively solve real-world e-bus scheduling instances including hundreds of trips
Summary
Buses account for only a small number of all the vehicles on city roads, but their emissions take up a much higher portion of the total road emissions owing to their long operation time and distance [1]. While in the infeasible schedule, the e-bus starts one day’s operation from Shekou Port Depot, carrying out three service trips (two up trips and one down trip) after finishing, which needs a long-distance non-service travel to return to the base depot, Shekou Port Depot, at the end of the day. Such kind of long-distance non-service travel should be avoided as much as possible according to the transit agency.
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