Charging Type Selection for Electric Buses Using Interval-Valued Neutrosophic Decision Support Model

Using electricity to fuel buses has always been known as a green option for the public bus operations considering the recent regulations on environmental and climate concerns. Emission-free public transportation modes such as electric buses improve local air quality and reduce noise pollution and also contribute to achieving sustainability goals by developing a sustainable transportation system. Many projects have been carried out using different charging strategies for electric buses around the world. However, selecting the most appropriate charging strategy for the electric buses in the public transportation is a challenging and multidimensional decision-making problem for transportation management sector. Therefore, this article proposes a decision support model based on the interval-valued neutrosophic set which uses Shannon's entropy and mixed aggregation by comprehensive normalization technique to choose the most appropriate charging type for urban electric buses among alternatives such as opportunity, depot, inductive, and no shift. This article presents a real-life case study in Turkey to illustrate the applicability and advantages of the proposed model. Extensive sensitivity analysis and comparative analysis tests are conducted to show the robustness of the proposed methodology. The results show that depot charging is the most suitable charging strategy for Istanbul's bus operator system.