Electrified Emergency Services Fleet Planning

Abstract

In line with the global and national climate goal of decarbonization and achieving net-zero emissions, fire and rescue services (FRS) are under growing pressure to transition to fossil-free fleet, including electrical vehicles. However, the transition to an electrified emergency-vehicle fleet entails several challenges for FRS, most importantly maintaining response times and coverage while managing reduced vehicle availability due to technical characteristics of electrical vehicles, such as charging downtime. The decision on how many electrical vehicles are needed to replace FRS’s current internal-combustion-engine vehicles (ICEV) and how these vehicles should be allocated between stations is not trivial to make. Thus, we propose an optimization model, as a first deterministic baseline, to determine the minimum number of electrified vehicles of each type required at each station of an FRS organization. The model accounts for characteristics of electrical vehicles, such as charging downtime.