Integrated Route and Charging Planning for Electric Vehicles

Abstract

This thesis is aimed at journey planning for electric vehicles (EVs), where it is necessary to make stops at charging stations. We minimize the travel costs of the journey in a model o transport network where the price per unit of energy may vary due to the ’Dynamic pricing’ strategy. To avoid inappropriate detours, we consider that travel time is also included in the travel costs. Furthermore, the significance of the time spent on the journey is determined by the EV driver himself. We have proposed a bicriteria algorithm that computes a set of opti- mal journeys. The set contains a journey with the minimum travel costs, a journey with the minimum travel time and alternative journeys that are the trade-off between both criteria. The algorithm is based on Bicriteria Shortest Path algorithm. We extended the Bicriteria Shortest Path algorithm to satisfy the EV battery constraints and to allow recharging at charging stations. Moreover, we proposed some techniques that speed up the algorithm at the expense of harming the optimality of solutions. We implemented the algorithm in Java language and tested on the real-world model of Germany road network with Tesla’s charg- ing stations. The evaluation of our experiments shows that the computation time of the algorithm is 622 ms on average. Finally, we developed the web application ’Charge Here’ where the same algorithm is applied.