Scheduling and dynamic charging optimizations for electric buses with time-varying electricity tariffs

Abstract

With the rapidly increasing popularity of electric buses (EBs), their scheduling and charging decisions have become an important issue. This paper proposes a novel approach to simultaneously optimize scheduling and dynamic charging problems for EBs considering a nonlinear charging function, time-varying electricity tariffs, stochastic energy consumption, and other realistic conditions concurrently. The framework comprises a set partitioning master problem for selecting scheduling plans and a stochastic dynamic programming subproblem for generating scheduling plans and charging policies. An efficient branch-and-price algorithm is then proposed to solve the problem of interest, and several acceleration subalgorithms are designed. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method are verified through numerical experiments. The results show that the proposed method can accurately and quickly obtain near-optimal solutions for realistic scale problems, thereby providing a certain decision reference for the operation and management of EB companies.