Optimization of charging station placement by using taxi probe data for on-demand electrical bus system

Abstract

The development of on-demand bus system and the spread of electrical vehicles have been focused in Japan. In the on-demand bus system, customers are transported by share-ride buses door-to-door, and buses pick up and drop off customers as soon as whenever required. Therefore, the efficiency of this system is superior to traditional normal bus systems (i.e., a schedule according to bus timetables and bus stops). We expect that the introduction of electrical vehicles to the on-demand bus system in order to reduce carbon dioxide. However, our target system, we call on-demand electrical bus system, has a problem caused by the battery charge capability of electrical vehicles (e.g., a charge timing problem). In order to solve this problem, in this paper we try to optimize the placement of charging stations in a service area by using taxi probe data at Tokyo. The taxi probe data is a history of taxi such as the position and speed. We separated the service area to some small districts according to the occurrence frequency of customers by three ways. Moreover, we place charging stations on top districts. The simulation results indicated that the customer acceptance rate increases about 4%, and the average transport time decreases 0.2 minutes by optimizing the charging station placement. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.