The simulation platform behind opt-e-fleet

From timetable to electric operation

eFLIPS (electric fleet and infrastructure planning system) is a modular toolkit. All modules work on a shared database; each step can be used on its own or swapped for your own tools. A typical run looks like this:

1. Import the network. Your timetable and scheduling data in the usual formats: VDV 451/452, GTFS or operator-specific exports. Nothing has to be entered again.
2. Build vehicle schedules. The software chains trips into schedules that are feasible on one battery charge. Existing schedules can be kept unchanged.
3. Assign depots. Every schedule gets its depot, including pull-in and pull-out trips.
4. Place charging infrastructure. The software determines which route ends need chargers and at what power — or whether depot charging alone is enough.
5. Simulate the design week. A realistic week of operation on the coldest day that still runs the full timetable. Vehicle by vehicle, minute by minute.
6. Report the demand. Fleet size, chargers, depot layout, load profile at the grid connection, total cost and environmental impact.

The result is a set of fully computed variants. Which one fits your land, your grid and your budget is your decision — made on concrete numbers.

Energy consumption: measured, not guessed

Consumption is the most sensitive input of any electrification plan. eFLIPS works either with a simple per-kilometre value or with a four-dimensional map of gradient, outside temperature, occupancy and speed. The map we ship is built from almost 800,000 km of real driving data from Berlin service. For rail vehicles we simulate consumption from the underlying physics: mass, gradient, acceleration, running resistance, recovered braking energy.

On the coldest day of the year, consumption runs about half again above the warmest, because heating is fed from the traction battery. That is why we simulate the design case, not the average: the design temperature is one of the most expensive decisions in the whole plan, and it should be taken deliberately.

The depot in detail

The depot module simulates, event by event, what happens between pull-in and pull-out: parking, cleaning, charging, shunting, dispatch. From this follow the number of vehicles actually needed, the number of chargers, and the load profile at the grid connection. Smart charging management spreads charging across the idle times: in the Berlin case, the peak load across all depots fell by about half, with no operational drawback. That shrinks the grid connection you have to pay for.

Cost and environmental impact

An evaluation module computes two balances from the same simulation results:

• Total cost of ownership (TCO): vehicles, batteries, charging infrastructure, staff, energy and maintenance over the project lifetime, with replacements and price trends, condensed to euros per revenue kilometre. Diesel and electric sit side by side in the same run.
• Life cycle assessment (LCA): to ISO 14040/14044 on ecoinvent data, from battery production to a grid mix that gets cleaner over the project years. Besides greenhouse gases, seven further impact categories are reported, including particulate matter.

Proven and scalable

The platform has computed Berlin’s complete bus network: more than 1,600 vehicles, six depots, a representative week of operation built from BVG’s operating data. In a benchmark of 25 German transit operators, set up from public GTFS timetables alone, the smallest network ran in 40 seconds and large ones in about an hour — all on a single workstation. For the Ulm network we compared our results with an independent professional feasibility study: the conclusions on fleet size and charging infrastructure agree.

Open source, for good reason

eFLIPS is released under the AGPL; the modules are on GitHub and PyPI. For you this means three things. Every number can be traced back to its formula — there is no black box. No vendor can lock you in; your models and data stay usable. And the software stays available, whatever becomes of any single company.

The source code is free. What you pay for is the work that turns software into a plan: building your network model, checking the input data, training and support.

Publications

The methods are published in peer-reviewed journals:

Talk to us

If you want to check whether eFLIPS fits your planning task, we will show you — on your own data. A timetable in VDV or GTFS format is enough to start.