Cost-Benefit Analysis of Electric Bus Fleet with Various Operation Intervals

Electric buses are particularly suitable for city and suburban routes due to zero local exhaust and noise emissions. The operation schedule interval defines the charging power, bus fleet size and total cost of ownership of a bus. We propose a novel cost-benefit method for the scheduling of an electric city bus fleet on a single route. Three different charging infrastructure scenarios were considered. In the first scenario, only one charging station was used. The second scenario considered two charging stations that were located at the same terminus. In the third scenario, two charging stations were located at opposite terminuses. The costs and utilization rates of the buses were analyzed with operation intervals up to 40 minutes. The first scenario with a single charging station had the lowest costs for the entire bus fleet system when the utilization rate was considered. Furthermore, the results show that certain schedule intervals are more cost-beneficial in terms of vehicle specific life-cycle costs than others. In the future, the proposed method is expanded to aid the design of bus network scheduling under energy demand uncertainty.