24/7 carbon-free electrified campus fleet

Team: Ram Rajagopal, Marco Pavone, Nicholas Bambos, Liang Min, Omer Karaduman, Gustavo Cezar
Large Scale (Scaling)

The goal of this project was to understand the challenges and benefits of electrifying transportation and decarbonizing the transportation industry. 

The team developed a software platform to determine the cost and emissions of various operations being piloted with Stanford’s Marguerite Shuttle fleet of 38 electric buses. We established pipelines to integrate data continuously and produced a data-driven model to estimate the energy consumption of electric buses based on the weather, route, and operating conditions. With all these data, we have developed a scalable optimization model to determine bus assignments, charging schedules, and bus dispatch schedules for fleet sizes ranging from 38 to 200 buses (municipal transit bus depots). We have conducted several case studies, sensitivity analyses, and techno-economic analyses. The software platform’s optimized decisions reduce carbon emissions by 98% and reduce the campus electricity bill for the Marguerite shuttle depot by nearly $180,000. We have engaged with operators from First Transit, and we will continue to scale our work and to focus on real-time operations. We plan to manage uncertainty within the system to impact the software platform’s ability to reduce costs, reduce emissions, and improve fleet resiliency.