Operation and charging scheduling of electric buses in a city bus route network

To promote wide-spread adoption of Electric Vehicles (EVs), various government organizations are providing subsidies for installation of charging infrastructure in various countries and encouraging the adoption of Electric Buses (EV Buses) for city transportation. Though EV Buses are environment-friendly, the buses as well as the charging facilities including quick chargers and rechargeable Stationary Storage Batteries (SSBs) are expensive. Therefore, it is expected that in near future some of the city buses of a route will be replaced with EV Buses, and SSBs along with grid power will be used to charge these buses. In that situation, proper operation and charging scheduling of the EV Buses will be needed. In this paper, we propose a k-Greedy Algorithm-based approach for this task. We perform simulations by using the real bus diagram data of four bus routes of a city bus route network in Japan and evaluate the algorithm from various perspectives. Our simulation results suggest that the k-Greedy Algorithm can maximize the travel distance of the EV Buses, which contributes to reducing fuel cost and CO2 emission for a bus operator.