Given the goal of reducing emissions and saving energy, an increasing number of transit agencies have proposed electrification plans for public transport buses. The two fundamental challenges to adopting electric vehicles in transit operations are the purchase of appropriate electric vehicles to establish the bus fleet and the creation of an efficient schedule and recharging plan. This paper examines the multi-depot and multi-vehicle type electric vehicle scheduling problem with partial mixed-route strategy and partial recharging policy. The partial mixed-route strategy proposed in this paper allows multiple transit routes to operate in a more cost-efficient way. Moreover, it takes into account the bus allocation problem of the transit network fleet to meet the parking restrictions of each depot. The problem is formulated in a mixed-integer programming model, and an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm with new mechanisms specific to the problem is proposed to apply the model in a more efficient manner. The dataset of a real transit network in Nanjing is used for case study, and the performance of ALNS is tested by using randomly generated instances from the dataset. The results show that the proposed method is effective in finding high quality solutions and adopting partial recharging policy can reduce the fleet size and the total cost while providing advantages depending on the operational parameters of the schedule. In addition, comparison of two schedules using different partial mixed-route strategies shows that there may be two sides of adopting mixed-route scheduling.

Eco-driving guidance refers to courses, warnings, or suggestions provided to human drivers to improve driving behaviour to enable less energy use and emissions. This paper reviews existing eco-driving guidance studies and identifies challenges to tackle in the future. We summarize two categories of current guidance systems, static and dynamic, distinguished by whether real-world driving records are used to generate behaviour guidance or not. We find that influencing factors, such as the content of suggestions, the display methods, and drivers’ socio-demographic characteristics, have varied effects on the guidance results across studies. Drivers are reported to have basic eco-driving knowledge, while the question of how to motivate the acceptance and practice of such behaviour, especially in the long term, is overlooked. Adaptive driving suggestions based on drivers’ individual habits can improve the effectiveness and acceptance while this field is under investigation. In-vehicle assistance presents potential safety issues, and visualized in-vehicle assistance is reported to be most distractive. Given existing studies focusing on the operational level, a common agreement on the guidance design and associated influencing factors has yet to be reached. Research on the systematic and tactical design of eco-driving guidance and in-vehicle interaction is advised.