The Electric Vehicle Scheduling Problem for Buses in Networks with Multi-Port Charging Stations

Abstract

As more and more cities try to reduce their CO2 emissions, public transport fleets are undergoing a transition from conventional to electric vehicles. To complete this shift, there is a need to build the required charging infrastructure. When the first electric buses were adopted, the charging stations were mostly built in the locations of large bus depots. However, in recent years, there has been a crowding problem in the charging stations resulting in queuing and unnecessary delays. In this study, we explore the potential of replacing single-port charging stations with multi-port charging stations that can serve multiple vehicles at once with a reduced charging rate. Because the charging rate reduces with the number of ports, we develop a mixed-integer linear program to determine the charging schedules of bus fleets in order to reduce the overall delays in the bus network. The novel formulation is tested in benchmark instances of various sizes demonstrating the improvement potential.