A heuristic approach for scheduling of electrical buses

The planning process of public transit systems have for long been a subject treated in operations research. In recent years, research within the public transit area focus on adapting this planning process for electric vehicles. This thesis evaluates a heuristic approach to the vehicle scheduling problem for electrical buses without the use of any licensed software. Among the previous research is an article that presents a mathematical model for scheduling of electrical buses using AMPL and CPLEX. However, due to not finding optimal solutions for all instances of the problem, the question of a heuristic approach is raised. Literature studies indicate that large neighbourhood search (LNS)-based heuristics have shown previous success for scheduling of vehicles. Results from the implementation of a constructive heuristic combined with an LNS-heuristic are compared with the results from the mathematical model and CPLEX. We see some success using the heuristic approach. However, the method we compare against still provide better solutions for almost all instances. More specifically, the difference between the results (number of buses needed) increases with an increasing complexity of the problem. Finally, due to the lacking results, some recommendations are given for improving the performance of the heuristic