Charge Schedule Optimization and Infrastructure Planning for Solar-Integrated Electric Bus Transit Systems

As urban transit systems transition towards electrification, using renewable energy sources (RES), such as solar, is essential to make them efficient and sustainable.

However, the intermittent nature of renewables poses a challenge in deciding the solar panel requirements and battery energy storage system (BESS) capacity at charging locations.

To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage multi-scenario model that considers seasonality in solar energy generation while incorporating temperature-based variations in bus energy consumption and dynamic time-of-use electricity prices.

Specifically, we formulate the problem as a multi-scenario linear program (LP) where the first-stage long-term variables determine the charging station power capacity, BESS capacity, and the solar panel area at each charging location.

The second-stage scenario-specific variables prescribe the energy transferred to buses directly from the grid or the BESS during layovers.

We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework using data from Durham Transit Network (Ontario) and Action Buses (Canberra), where bus schedules and charging locations are determined using a concurrent scheduler-based heuristic.

Solar energy data is collected from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) database.

We solve the multi-scenario LP using Benders' decomposition, which performs better than the dual simplex method, especially when the number of scenarios is high.

With solar energy production at select terminals, our model estimated a cost savings of 9.72% and 23.79% for the Durham and Canberra networks, respectively.

Our results also show that the scenario-based schedule adapts better to seasonal variations than a schedule estimated from average input parameters.