Operationalising a Digital Twin for Electric Bus Dispatch: Quantile‐Transfer Calibration and Policy‐Ready Rulebooks

Battery‐electric bus (BEB) dispatch reliability in hot climates is limited by day‐to‐day variability in energy demand and by uncertainty in auxiliary loads and charging access. We develop a telemetry‐anchored digital twin workflow that converts a calibrated MATLAB/Simulink longitudinal energy model into reliability‐based dispatch guidance using day‐aware splits (DayID) and day‐weighted evaluation. Using telematics from two BEBs operating in Belize (131 bus‐days; 1341 exported segments; 1187 QC‐passing segments and 674 segments used for fitting and scenario simulation), the calibrated model achieves median absolute day‐level noncharging energy errors of 11.3% (train), 12.4% (validation) and 13.5% (test), with median filtered‐power RMSE of 7.6–7.8 kW across splits. We define shortfall risk via p ‐quantile ‘safe distance’ thresholds computed from simulated range‐to‐reserve and estimate conservative envelopes using day‐bootstrap lower confidence bounds. Out‐of‐sample quantile‐transfer diagnostics show pooled p10 thresholds transfer close to nominal shortfall frequencies, whereas the long‐duty regime requires conservative treatment. Scenario sweeps over temperature, reserve SoC (0.10–0.25), HVAC efficiency and usable capacity indicate that battery‐only feasibility tightens sharply under heat stress; temperatures above the observed telemetry window (≈ 23.8°C–31.5°C) are treated as scenario‐planning stress tests (e.g., pooled reserve limit declines from 0.17 at 28°C to 0.11 at 32°C and becomes infeasible at 35°C within the tested reserve grid). Crediting observed opportunity charging (median 22–64 kWh/day depending on day type) expands feasible reserve envelopes and converts residual gaps into minutes‐scale charging requirements under typical charger powers; this ‘with‐charge’ case is an upper bound unless comparable charging access can be ensured operationally. The resulting dispatch charts and temperature‐binned reserve rulebook provide an operational interface from calibrated energy modelling to reliability‐based planning, with explicit flags where reserve policy alone is insufficient.