Smart and sustainable scheduling of charging events for electric buses

This paper presents a framework for the efficient management of renewable energies to charge a fleet of electric buses (eBuses). Our framework starts with the prediction of clean energy time windows, i.e., periods of time when the production of clean energy exceeds the demand of the country. Then, the optimization phase schedules charging events to reduce the use of non-clean energy to recharge eBuses while passengers are embarking or disembarking. The proposed framework is capable of overcoming the unstable and chaotic nature of wind power generation to operate the fleet without perturbing the quality of service. Our extensive empirical validation with real instances from Ireland suggests that our solutions can significantly reduce non-clean energy consumed on large data setsThis work received funding from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) Research, Development and Demonstration (RDD) 2019 programme under the grant number 19/ RDD/51