Optimizing Charging Infrastructures of Electric Bus Routes to Minimize Total Ownership Cost

Electrification of public transport systems has become a strategic priority due to the highly versatile potential of electric vehicles (EVs) as distributed energy resources (DERs) Despite the logistic ease of transitioning conventional public transport systems to fully-electric ones, the latter must be properly designed to adhere to technical constraints and minimize their total ownership cost (TOC). Most published work addresses this issue with a narrow scope, such as modeling a very specific case study, leading to non-generic models which are difficult to apply for a universal case. In this study, a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is formulated to model a generic public transport network, comprising the routes, electric bus models, and charging infrastructures. The objective function minimizes the TOC of a generic network, which can be applied to any universal case study. The constructed model is tested by simulating a system with different routes, bus models, and types of chargers to obtain the optimal configuration of the charging infrastructure.