The uncapacitated battery swapping facility location problem with localized charging system serving electric bus fleet

This paper considers a refueling system for battery electric buses (BEBs) with battery swapping technology. The service capability of the battery swapping stations (BSSs) is restricted by localized charging system in terms of its charger type and the quantity of both chargers and batteries. The modelling intention is to answer four fundamental questions: How many BSSs should there be? Where should they be? Which BEBs should they serve? How big should they be? In this context, the problem has been formulated as a mixed-integer problem and decomposed into two subproblems. The first subproblem solves the uncapacitated fixed charge facility location problem (UFCFLP) to find the optimal BSSs location and the swapping demand assignment of BEBs. The optimal configuration of localized charging system is developed as integer linear programming problem to decide the charger type and battery inventory in the second subproblem. The solution method is tested on a small network under various parameter settings to investigate the BSS location and configuration and verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed solution approach. Results shows that the battery capacity would affect the number of BSS to locate and the localized charging system configuration mainly depends on the charger and battery costs.