Abstract

An essential part of electrifying bus networks is deciding on the appropriate charging strategy among the many available alternatives, such as opportunistic (rapid) charging techniques and overnight (slow) charging. The broad usage of electric buses in public transportation networks and the increasing demand for environmentally friendly transportation options have elevated the significance of this step. This research establishes a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) fusion method for choosing the optimal electric bus charging strategy by considering various variables, including operational, quality-of-service, social, environmental, and economic factors. To determine what matters most for making decisions in this field, we surveyed electric bus specialists and reviewed the literature extensively. We used the TOPSIS method as an MCDM fusion method to combine the criteria and alternatives. We compute the weights of criteria by the average method. Then, the TOPSIS fusion method selects and ranks the alternatives. We collected the 20 criteria and five alternatives in this study. We show that overnight is the best charging strategy in the electric bus system. We performed a sensitivity analysis to show the different cases in criteria weights, then ranked the alternatives under different weights to establish the stability of the results.