Optimization of electric bus vehicle scheduling and charging strategies under Time-of-Use electricity price

With the growing awareness of environmental protection and energy conservation, more and more cities choose to utilize electric buses (EBs) in their public transit systems. Due to the limitations of battery technology, many fully charged EBs are not enough to complete their daily tasks, which must be charged twice or more times per day. Besides, many cities encourage the off-peak electricity power consumption, and the charging cost of EBs during peak hours is often extremely high. From an economic viewpoint, it is thus one practical and urgent problem on how to decide the fleet size of EBs and organize their charging schedules for the bus companies. To solve this problem, this manuscript builds a mixed-integer programming (MIP) model via taking the scheduling and charging constraints of EBs into consideration. Also, one dynamic label setting-based branch and price (DLS-BP) algorithm is proposed accordingly, whose efficiency is further verified and compared with two heuristic algorithms via some numerical experiments.