A Concise Guide on the Integration of Battery Electric Buses into Urban Bus Networks

TL;DR

This paper provides a concise overview of optimization-based methods for integrating battery-electric buses into urban networks, highlighting gaps between current research and practical needs.

Contribution

It identifies practitioners' requirements and evaluates existing models against these needs, outlining future research directions.

Findings

Existing models partially meet practitioners' requirements.

Significant gaps between research and practice are identified.

Recommendations for future research to bridge these gaps.

Abstract

With the increasing market penetration of battery-electric buses into urban bus networks, practitioners face many novel planning problems. As a result, the interest in optimization-based decision-making for these planning problems increases but practitioners' requirements on planning solutions and current academic approaches often diverge. Against this background, this survey aims to provide a concise guide on optimization-based planning approaches for integrating battery-electric buses into urban bus networks for both practitioners and academics. First, we derive practitioners' requirements for integrating battery-electric buses from state-of-the-art specifications, project reports, and expert knowledge. Second, we analyze whether existing optimization-based planning models fulfill these practitioners' requirements. Based on this analysis, we carve out the existing gap between practice and research and discuss how to address these in future research.