Abstract
Considering the necessity of electric school buses in replacement of conventional diesel school buses, this paper proposes an optimization model based on mixed integer programming to allocate electric school buses to existing and pre-determined routes where the travel paths and location sequences for each electric school bus are also be determined by this model. This model considers heterogeneous electric school buses and mixed loading of the students in the buses. Key factors including seating capacity, battery capacity, charge consumption cost, and bus price are considered in determining the best allocation of buses to different routes, to minimize overall costs. We present an illustrative example to demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of this approach.