Optimal Design of Battery, Charging Infrastructure Planning, and Charging Scheduling for Electric Bus Network

Recognizing the growing global threat of air pollution, transit agencies and governments across the world are focusing on switching to electric vehicles (EVs). Battery electric buses (BEB) are becoming a crucial component to plan a sustainable transportation system. Two biggest drawbacks of BEBs are range anxiety and higher charging time. To overcome these hurdles, decision-makers are required to execute strategic decisions such as planning and design of charging locations as well as operational decisions like scheduling the charging activities for BEBs. This study gives insight into the planning and design of charging infrastructure network for BEBs while minimizing the total annual cost of designing the BEB system Apart from this, this study also focuses on the scheduling part for BEBs and provide information on the occurrence of charging activities for BEBs. A mixed-integer linear programming model is formulated which models the trade-off between route-specific battery capacity and terminal-level charging power (charger size along with the number of chargers at a terminal) and generates a scheduling plan for charging the BEBs. A part of New Delhi’s public bus network identified for electrification (18 bus routes and 21 terminal stations) by its transit agency was selected for our model application. Results suggested that model was able to obtain trade-off between battery size allocation and charger size selection.