Techno-economic assessment of wireless charging systems for airport electric shuttle buses

Flightpath 2050, the European Commission's vision for aviation, requires that the aviation industry achieves a 75 % reduction in CO2 emissions per passenger mile and airports become emission-free by 2050. Airport shuttle buses in the airfields are going to be electrified to reduce ground emissions. Simultaneously, the airfield movement space and time schedules are becoming more limited for adopting stationary charging facilities for electrified ground vehicles. Therefore, the dynamic wireless charging technology becomes a promising technology to help improve the stability of electrification of the airfield transport network. This paper proposes a techno-economic assessment of wireless charging, wired charging, and conventional technologies for electrifying airport shuttle buses. A bi-level planning optimisation approach combines the multi-objective Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-III) and mixed integer linear programming (MILP) algorithm to handle a large number of decision variables and constraints generated from the investigated problem. The airport shuttle bus transport is simulated through a multi-agent-based model (MABM) approach. Four case studies are analysed for illustrating the techno-economic feasibility of wireless charging technology for airport electric shuttle buses. The results show that the wireless charging technology enables the electric shuttle buses to carry smaller batteries while conducting the same as tasks conventional diesel/petrol vehicles and the bi-directional wireless charging technology could help mitigate the impact of electrification of shuttle buses on the distribution network.

Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC): EP/S032053/1