Investigators:
Dr. Randall L. Guensler, Georgia Tech
Dr. Michael O. Rodgers, Georgia Tech
Haobing Liu, Ph.D. Student, Georgia Tech
Project Overview:
Electric buses have much lower total energy use and greenhouse gas emissions compared with diesel, hybrid diesel, and CNG buses. The Georgia Tech team is developing a streamlined method to predict battery electric bus recharge capacity from modified GTFS data. The MARTA bus system in Atlanta serves as the case study. The modeling approach first integrates a headway file provided by the transit agency into the GTFS framework. Using the schedule and headway files in the updated GTFS setup, the system calculates the dwell time for each bus at each station throughout the day. The results from this activity provide the time available at each station that the bus could use for re-charging while still maintaining the bus schedule. The GTFS schedule is then linked to monitored second-by-second onroad MARTA bus data to predict energy demand between each station for each trip. When complete, the modeling tool will be able to identify the routes that can support the deployment of battery-electric buses and identify the stations in which to locate recharging systems that provide enough charge capacity to meet the energy demand of the route.