Infrastructure Optimization for Bus Fleet Electrification
Status:
This project started in April 2025 and ended in April 2026.
Researchers:
Luca Pinter
Industry Partner:
PostAuto
Description:
In collaboration with PostAuto, this project focused on optimizing depot-based charging strategies for electric bus fleets. The main objective was reduce energy costs through advanced robust charging schedule optimization under realistic operational constraints and scenario uncertainty.
Optimal charging schedules were developed and compared against heuristic approaches, demonstrating significant potential for cost reduction, primarily driven by peak load shaving. These results highlight the importance of coordinated charging strategies in minimizing operational energy costs.
A complementary analysis assessed the integration of stationary battery storage at depots, providing insights into its operational impact. In addition, a model predictive control (MPC) framework was implemented to simulate real-time operation under uncertainty, particularly accounting for variability in bus energy consumption, enabling robust evaluation of the proposed strategies in dynamic environments.
Finally, a workflow was developed to convert public GTFS timetable data into structured depot configurations, enabling scalable generation of realistic optimization scenarios. Based on this work, two open-source tools were released: one for depot charging optimization and one for GTFS-to-depot data transformation.
You can find further details here:
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-c-000787335