Infrastructure planning for inductive charging in electrified shuttle systems

In response to climate goals, growing environmental awareness, and financial incentives, municipalities increasingly seek to electrify public transportation networks. We study the problem of locating stationary and dynamic inductive charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs), allowing detours from fixed transit routes and schedules. Dynamic charging, which enables energy transfer while driving, reduces space usage in dense urban areas and lowers vehicle idle times. We formulate a cost-minimization problem that considers both infrastructure and operational costs and propose an Iterated Local Search (ILS) algorithm to solve instances of realistic size. Each configuration requires solving a decomposed subproblem comprising multiple resource-constrained shortest-path problems. To do so, we employ a bidirectional label-setting algorithm with lazy dominance checks based on local bounds. On adapted benchmark instances, our approach outperforms a commercial solver by up to 57% in solution quality. We further apply our method to a real-world case study in Hof, Germany. Results indicate that, under current cost structures, calibrated from a test track in Bad Staffelstein, dynamic inductive charging is not yet cost-competitive with stationary alternatives. We quantify the value of allowing detours at up to 3.9% of the total system cost and show that integrating photovoltaics with decentralized energy storage can yield savings exceeding 20% by contributing more than 60% to the fleet’s charging demand during operations.