A planning framework for intra-city electric bus road transportation systems

Gasoline-based vehicle transportation plays a crucial role in environmental pollution, which eventually leads to serious health issues in urban areas. The scope of large-scale deployment of personalized electric vehicles in the near future can lean towards such issues but can overburden local distribution grids (LDGs), and the entities are producing green energy. In this context, an electric bus road transportation system (EBRTS) can be seen as an effective and promising way, although it is capital-intensive. EBRTs can be successfully deployed by developing a well-tailored planning model that encompasses amicable solutions while considering the conflicting interests of electric utilities and investors/transporters.

This paper proposes a planning model for intra-city EBRTS, especially for metropolitan cities, to extract tangible benefits in favour of electric utilities and private players. The proposed framework envisages a bus fleet charging model and financial model within the spatial, technical, and financial constraints yet preserves the interests of electric utilities and investors by providing tentative solutions with all information necessary from the investor’s perspective. The methodology is free from optimization as the realistic constraints inherently employ search space reduction. The simulation results on a real public transportation system reveal the proposed methodology’s simplicity, rationality, applicability, and flexibility.