In response to escalating environmental concerns and tightening regulations, battery power has emerged as a promising solution for short- and medium-distance inland waterway freight transportation. Recently, inland electric ships have increasingly adopted the battery swapping mode. This paper develops an optimisation-based approach to identify the most cost-effective battery swapping strategy, taking into account energy management and voyage scheduling. The proposed approach fills a critical gap by providing flexibility in selecting battery swapping stations and determining the quantities of batteries to be swapped. A case study of an inland electric container ship sailing on the Yangtze River is presented, demonstrating that the proposed approach can achieve cost savings of approximately 5%. Furthermore, this paper explores the impact of voyage-related and battery-related factors on battery swapping strategies. The proposed approach also demonstrates adaptability to scenarios involving battery grouping strategies. These findings could offer valuable insights for ship operators, station operators, and policymakers.
Guo et al. (Thu,) studied this question.