Document Type
Article
Author ORCID Identifier
Daniel Mortensen https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7649-4452
Journal/Book Title/Conference
World Electric Vehicle Journal
Volume
15
Issue
4
Publisher
MDPI AG
Publication Date
4-10-2024
Journal Article Version
Version of Record
First Page
1
Last Page
28
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Abstract
Incorporating battery electric buses into bus fleets faces three primary challenges: a BEB’s extended refuel time, the cost of charging, both by the consumer and the power provider, and large compute demands for planning methods. When BEBs charge, the additional demands on the grid may exceed hardware limitations, so power providers divide a consumer’s energy needs into separate meters even though doing so is expensive for both power providers and consumers. Prior work has developed a number of strategies for computing charge schedules for bus fleets; however, prior work has not worked to reduce costs by aggregating meters. Additionally, because many works use mixed integer linear programs, their compute needs make planning for commercial-sized bus fleets intractable. This work presents a multi-program approach to computing charge plans for electric bus fleets. The proposed method solves a series of subproblems where the solution to the charge problem becomes more refined with each problem, moving closer to the optimal schedule. The results demonstrate how runtimes are reduced by using intermediate subproblems to refine the bus charge solution so that the proposed method can be applied to large bus fleets of 100+ buses. Not only will we demonstrate that runtimes scale linearly with the number of buses but we will also show how the proposed method scales to large bus fleets of over 100 buses while managing the monthly cost of energy.
Recommended Citation
Mortensen, D.; Gunther, J. A Scalable Approach to Minimize Charging Costs for Electric Bus Fleets. World Electr. Veh. J. 2024, 15, 161. https://doi.org/10.3390/wevj15040161