The city of Hamburg has decided to electrify its bus fleets. The two public transportation companies in this city expect to operate up to 1500 buses by 2030. In order to accomplish this ambitious goal, both companies need to build an appropriate charging infrastructure. They have both decided to implement the centralized depot charging concept. Buses can therefore charge only at the depot and do not have the possibility for opportunity charging at intermediate stations. The load profile of such a bus depot is highly dependent on the charging schedule of buses. Without an intelligent scheduling system, the buses charge on demand as soon as they arrive to the depot. This can lead to an unevenly distributed load profile with high load peaks, which is problematic for the local grid as well as for the equipment dimensioning at the depot. Charging scheduling on large-scale bus depots is a relatively new and poorly researched topic. This paper addresses the issue and proposes two algorithms for charging scheduling on large-scale bus depots with the goal to minimize the peak load. The schedules created with the proposed algorithms were both tested and validated in the Bus Depot Simulator, a cosimulation platform used for bus depot simulations.

Owing to the immense climate changes in recent years, the city of Hamburg has decided to allow the purchase of only emission-free buses for public transportation. Meanwhile, Hamburg focuses on the implementation of electric buses. For this purpose, the two public transportation companies in Hamburg which are the Hamburger Hochbahn AG (HOCHBAHN), and the Verkehrsbetriebe Hamburg-Holstein GmbH (VHH) decided to build new charging infrastructure for electric bus depots. In addition, they started by electrifying their existing stations. This study proposes an optimal method for electrifying bus depots by modularizing the subsystems in electrical power systems. An approach that allows the study of different configurations of power system components. Analyzing these configurations results in the conclusion of the most technically feasible configuration achieving the lowest cost. Furthermore, the model objectives include reducing the required area, which is a challenging criterion for bus depots in many cities. Mixed-Integer Quadratic Programming (MIQP) is used to generate this combination based on predefined constraints that must satisfy all implemented constraints of the system.