Charging Scheduling for Electric Bus Fleets Considering Service Continuity

With the emerging climate crisis, and electric vehicles becoming more accessible, the transition of transportation from internal combustion to electric is becoming more and more prominent. While the transition of personal vehicles and most public transportation methods is rapid, the transformation of buses reveals different challenges. One of the leading challenges is continuous operation, considering the capacity of charging facilities and its strain on the distribution grid. Due to the greater size of electric bus batteries and the higher power consumption of these electric buses, charging coordination that ensures continuous service can be a struggle. To achieve continuous service while considering the limits of grid connection, a charging scheduling method with additional decision support capabilities in the sense of bus-route switching is proposed. The proposed method is approached as a mixed-integer linear programming implementation for charging scheduling, while bus-route switching consists of infeasibility detection and rule-based decisions.