How a Public Transit Customer has enhanced its zero emission vehicle operations with an integrated data platform
A U.S. public transit agency providing fixed route and paratransit services to the high desert communities in Southern California with 1.4M in annual ridership.
As part of its effort to transition to a 100% zero emission fleet, this company has purchased and deployed 12 battery electric buses and 12 60kW DC charging stations into its fleet and facilities. As part of introducing these new technologies, they risked service disruptions, reduced efficiency, and difficulty meeting its sustainability goals.
To mitigate these risks, they need an integrated software to focus on the following key challenges:
• Bring key operational information from across vehicles, chargers and dispatch into a centralized dashboard.
• Monitor and ensure successful charging events for its electric buses.
• Track real-time vehicle performance to maintain service schedules.
• Assess operational performance with systemwide analytics.
To address these challenges, they partnered with ZeroMission to provide its integrated data platform and operational monitoring system. This lead to the following outcomes and key results.
Integrating the key data
At the start, ZeroMission focused on integrating available bus telematics, charging station and dispatch systems into one platform. Thereby providing this company and its staff with a central dashboard by which to monitor electric bus operations and charging, and to create the information framework to support monitoring, tracking and reporting.
• Multi site operational management: seeing separate depots within one instance and tracking vehicle and charging use across both
• Vehicle integration: tracking all vehicles, states of charge, location history and comprehensive
• Charging system: monitoring charging status, charging events and tracking issues with session acceptance and utilization
• Dispatch system integration: intaking daily vehicle schedule requirements including each vehicles plan in terms of distance and time
Monitoring Charging Events
They operates their electric buses in daily fixed route service, where their vehicles start and return to the depot at scheduled times. Upon return to the depot in the afternoon, charging events would commonly fail or not occur. The result being buses not charged as required and not ready for next day service.
Using ZeroMission’s real time monitoring and alerts, they were able to visualize both the bus and charging activity centrally and to leverage alerts to notify relevant operations and maintenances teams when charging events were not happening to plan. This increased the overall success rate of charging events and lead to key operational insights that helped all their stakeholders better manage charging operations.
• Integrating all charging systems
• Monitoring live status, events and utilization
• Generating alerts & notifications when charging systems fail
• Tracking supplier performance
Tracking real-time vehicle performance
A common challenge for many pilot and early stage electric vehicle deployments, is educating the operational stakeholders on how to interpret the state of charge (SOC) displayed from the vehicle.
At their requet, ZeroMission was able to work with the bus supplier to identify data from the telematics system that would be useful to informing them when corrective maintenance issues were leading to disruption in service. This visibility provided the their team the needed information, when buses seemingly did not have enough SOC to start or complete service, to determine whether to stick to the plan or return them to depot and avoiding costly road service calls.
Assessing operational performance
For the first time, they were able to access systemwide reports and insights as it relates to its electric bus operations. Through this framework unique insights were generated that helped them identify and correct operational issues. For example, we were able to identify that several buses were commonly coming back to the depot, with auxiliaries being left on, and creating an excessive idling scenario.
The excessive draw down on the battery is a costly but easily avoidable issue with the right monitoring framework. As ZeroMission adds the ability to identify and alert on this behavior they expect to reduce its occurrence through real time reaction and work force education.
Overall Satisfaction
The Chief Maintenance Officer, had the following to say about the use of the software: “ZeroMission has been instrumental in our transition to an electric fleet. Their solution ensures our buses stay charged, stay on the road, and stay reliable for our community.We are excited to continue in our cooperation as we continue to introduce more zero emission vehicles into our fleet and operation.”
ZeroMission continues to partner with this public transit company, providing ongoing support to help scale and optimize their electric vehicle operations.