Optimized electrified meeting-point-based feeder bus services with capacitated charging stations and partial recharges

Meeting-point-based feeder services using EVs have good potential to achieve
an efficient and clean on-demand mobility service. However,
customer-to-meeting-point, vehicle routing, and charging scheduling need to be
jointly optimized to achieve the best system performance. To this aim, we
assess the effect of different system parameters and configure them based on
our previously developed hybrid metaheuristic algorithm. A set of test
instances based on morning peak hour commuting scenarios between the cities of
Arlon and Luxembourg are used to evaluate the impact of the set parameters on
the optimal solutions. The experimental results suggest that higher meeting
point availability can achieve better system performance. By jointly
configuring different system parameters, the overall system performance can be
significantly improved (-10.8% total kilometers traveled by vehicles compared
to the benchmark) to serve all requests. Our experimental results show that the
meeting-point-based system can reduce up to 70.2% the fleet size, 6.4% the
in-vehicle travel time and 49.4% the kilometers traveled when compared to a
traditional door-to-door dial-a-ride system.