Operation and Scheduling of Pure Electric Buses under Regular Charging Mode

In recent years, electric buses (EB) are increasingly employed worldwide because of its environmental benefits. However, due to the limitation on the driving range per charge, an EB may need to get recharged several times during its daily operation. Therefore, the operation of regular charging EB requires trip schedules together with proper charging plans, which specify the charging time and electricity amount to ensure satisfied service performance. In this paper, a neighborhood search based heuristic considering charging and dispatching policies was developed for scheduling the regular charging EB on city bus routes. The algorithm was tested on a real bus route in Shenzhen, China. With the objective of minimizing the annualized total cost, the algorithm provided optimized operation schedule. The cost-benefit analysis revealed that a trade off between the fixed cost and the charging cost should be made to decide on the fleet size. The availability of the charging facility at depots has a great impact on the annual cost. This study can assist the public transit agencies in making decisions on fleet investment and drawing up economical daily operation schedules.