Year
2023
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
School of Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering
Abstract
With the development of charging technologies and the drop in charger prices, fast chargers become more and more applicable and competitive in providing efficient and effective charging solutions to electric vehicles. Compared to normal chargers, fast chargers can top up the battery in a short time, which enables battery electric buses to get top-up charging at selected bus stops when the buses load and unload passengers. Such an en-route charging solution can avoid deadheading trips for returning to a charging station or depot during daily operation. In addition, battery electric buses with en-route charging usually carry small-size batteries, yielding less capital investment in purchasing batteries and increasing loading capacity for passengers. However, en-route charging facilities still yield high acquisition costs at the current stage. Moreover, en-route fast charging at bus stops may lead to extra waiting time and even delay time to the following service trips, reducing the level of service. Therefore, it is vital to optimise the deployment of en-route chargers from the perspectives of both transport operators and passengers.
This thesis investigates the problem of locating charging facilities in a battery electric bus transit system to minimise the total system cost, including the acquisition cost of chargers and batteries, total charging cost, and penalty cost for passengers’ satisfaction reduction. Multiple practical constraints in real life are involved in the model development, such as time-of-use electricity price, overlapping of charging activities and so on. This thesis is fourfold. Firstly, the joint problem of locating charging facilities at selected bus stops and charging scheduling considering uncertain travel time and passenger demand is investigated. The problem is formulated in a robust mathematical model with the intersection of box and budget uncertainty set. Secondly, the bus fleet transition problem from a conventional diesel fleet to an electric one is studied considering heterogeneous types of battery electric buses and both en-route and depot charging facilities. The problem captures the various characteristics of different types of electric buses, such as adaptability to chargers and energy consumption rate. Thirdly, the joint problem of battery electric bus scheduling, deployment of chargers and charging scheduling is explored. The problem considers homogeneous battery electric buses and chargers, which are solved by a Benders decomposition method incorporated with the branch-and-bound framework. Finally, the problem of deploying charging facilities in public transit systems is extended to deploy heterogeneous chargers for government-owned vehicle fleets. Heterogeneous electric vehicle types and the corresponding adaptability to different types of chargers are considered, and the Benders decomposition method is proposed to solve the model.
Recommended Citation
Hu, Hao, Optimal deployment of charging facilities for battery electric buses, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, University of Wollongong, 2023. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses1/1808
FoR codes (2008)
090507 Transport Engineering, 120506 Transport Planning
Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.