Electric demand-responsive transit routing with opportunity charging strategy

This study proposes a novel model for the design of electric demand-responsive transit (e-DRT) services, in which the vehicle service plan and opportunity charging plan can be optimized simultaneously. In particular, all recharging plans are well coordinated with flexible transit service schedules. A customized variable neighborhood search is developed to solve the proposed model efficiently. Real-world cases are presented to evaluate the system performance and justify the capability of the proposed method. Comparisons between Cplex and the heuristic suggest that the proposed algorithm can considerably improve computational efficiency. A comparative analysis shows the proposed model takes 11% less total cost than the alternative model with full charging strategy. Sensitivity analyses show the impacts of charging power, bus capacity, avail-ability of fast chargers, and initial state-of-charge on the e-DRT's performance.