An optimal battery charging and schedule control strategy for electric bus rapid transit

This article presents a novel scheduling strategy for charging and dispatching electric heterogeneous Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) fleets equipped with batteries. A key feature of this strategy is that it is formulated as a model-based convex optimization problem, which takes into account a horizon corresponding to an entire day and incorporates proper selection matrices for restricting the operation and charging status of each BRT. The approach is economic, since it considers the energy price variation during the day. The scheduling strategy is tested with a fleet of BRTs, considering two vehicle classes which differ mainly in their dimensions and capacities. Using the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) package, a simplified rule-based algorithm gives which type of BRT is needed in order to satisfy a given demand of passengers. This information is sent to the optimization which is solved in Matlab®. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the scheduling method and its capacity to compute an economic optimal solution.