Transit electrification has emerged as an unstoppable force, driven by the considerable environmental benefits it offers. However, the adoption of battery electric buses is still impeded by their limited flexibility, a constraint that necessitates adjustments to current bus scheduling plans. Consequently, this study aspires to offer a thorough review of articles focused on battery electric bus scheduling. Moreover, we provide a comprehensive review of 42 papers on electric bus scheduling and related studies, with a focus on the most recent developments and trends in this research domain. Despite this extensive review, our findings reveal a paucity of research that takes into account the robustness of electric bus scheduling. Furthermore, we highlight the critical areas of considering diverse charging modes in electric bus scheduling and integrated planning of electric buses, which have not been adequately explored but hold the potential to greatly boost the effectiveness of electric bus systems. Through this synthesis, we hope that readers could acquire a thorough comprehension of the studies in this field and be motivated to address the identified research gaps, thus propelling the progress of transit electrification.
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The purpose of this paper is to optimize the design of charging station deployed at the terminal station for electric transit, with explicit consideration of heterogenous charging modes.
The authors proposed a bi-level model to optimize the decision-making at both tactical and operational levels simultaneously. Specifically, at the operational level (i.e. lower level), the service schedule and recharging plan of electric buses are optimized under specific design of charging station. The objective of lower-level model is to minimize total daily operational cost. This model is solved by a tailored column generation-based heuristic algorithm. At the tactical level (i.e. upper level), the design of charging station is optimized based upon the results obtained at the lower level. A tabu search algorithm is proposed subsequently to solve the upper-level model.
This study conducted numerical cases to validate the applicability of the proposed model. Some managerial insights stemmed from numerical case studies are revealed and discussed, which can help transit agencies design charging station scientifically.
The joint consideration of heterogeneous charging modes in charging station would further lower the operational cost of electric transit and speed up the market penetration of battery electric buses.