Volume 9: Sustainable Energy Solutions for Changing the World: Part I

Optimal Daily Air Conditioner Usage of an Electric Bus considering Stochastic Travel Times Yajun Liu, Yiming Bie

Abstract

The electric bus (EB) has been widely recognized by the public in recent years because of low noise, high driving stability and zero emission. However, EB still has short driving range due to the on-board battery technology. In such condition, the drivers has the driving range anxiety and they dare not turn on the air conditioner (AC) during the operation. To solve this problem, a model is developed to optimize the AC usage of each trip for a given EB. The impact of environmental temperature and AC usage on the coach temperature is quantified. The energy consumption of each trip is estimated based on filed collected data. A chance constrained programming model is then developed considering the stochastic travel times. Maximizing total travel time of the trips that can provide comfortable temperature for passengers is taken as the objective function. Finally, a real bus route is used to validate the proposed method. Results show that the method can provide reliable AC usage scheme under the impacts of stochastic travel times.

Keywords Electric bus, stochastic travel time, air conditioner usage, optimization model.