Electric city bus gains popularity in recent years for its low greenhouse gas emission, low noise level, etc. Different from a passenger car, the weight of a city bus varies significantly with different amounts of onboard passengers, which is not well studied in existing literature. This study proposes a passenger load prediction model using day-of-week, time-of-day, weather, temperatures, wind levels, and holiday information as inputs. The average model, Regression Tree, Gradient Boost Decision Tree, and Neural Networks models are compared in the passenger load prediction. The Gradient Boost Decision Tree model is selected due to its best accuracy and high stability. Given the predicted passenger load, dynamic programming algorithm determines the optimal power demand for supercapacitor and battery by optimizing the battery aging and energy usage in the cloud. Then rule extraction is conducted on dynamic programming results, and the rule is real-time loaded to onboard controllers of vehicles. The proposed cloud-based dynamic programming and rule extraction framework with the passenger load prediction shows 4% and 11% fewer bus operating costs in off-peak and peak hours, respectively. The operating cost by the proposed framework is less than 1% shy of the dynamic programming with the true passenger load information.
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