Optimal control of electric automated buses in intercity lines: scenario-based analysis of the Pareto-optimal solutions

This paper deals with the optimal control of electric and automated buses that have to follow an intercity line, where some stops are equipped with a flash-charging infrastructure to charge the batteries, while others are not. In order to control these buses, it is necessary to account for the traffic conditions along the roads of the bus line, and to minimize two objectives related to the deviations from the bus timetable and the lack of energy, at the end of the bus trip, with respect to a desired final energy level. The resulting optimal control problem is a multi-objective linear quadratic problem with both continuous and integer variables. In this paper, we propose and apply two methods based on lexicographic ordering aimed at determining the Pareto-optimal solutions of the control problem in twelve scenarios inspired by a real case.