Iterated Local Search for the eBuses Charging Location Problem

Electric buses (eBuses) will be the mainstream in mass urban transportation in the near future. Thus, installing the charging infrastructure in convenient locations will play a critical role in the transition to eBuses. Taking this into account, in this paper we propose an iterated local search algorithm to optimize the location of charging stations while satisfying certain properties of the transportation system, e.g., satisfying the demand and ensuring that the limited driving range of the buses will not impact the service. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated by experimenting with a set of problem instances with real data from 3 Irish cities, i.e., Limerick, Cork, and Dublin. We compare our approach against a MIP-based solution. Results show that our approach is superior in terms of scalability and its anytime behavior.