Tour and charging scheduler development based on simulated annealing for electric vehicles

Abstract

For a rent-a-car business employing electric vehicles which will penetrate into our transportation system in the near future, this paper designs a tour and charging scheduler and develops its search engine based on simulated annealing techniques. The main focus is put on the reduction of driving distance and waiting time taking advantage of sophisticated computer algorithms, to cope with the problem of current battery capacity. Cooling process runs 15,000 times while heating process is inserted every 1,000-th iteration step, permitting an evolution to an adjacent neighbor having higher cost. The performance measurement result obtained from a prototype implementation finds out that we can achieve about 87 % of accuracy when the number of destinations is less than 10 and 70 % of error points lie in the range from 0 to 20 %. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.