A tour scheduler pursuing energy efficiency and time-dependent gains for electric vehicles

Abstract

This paper designs and develops a tour scheduler which guides electric vehicles an efficient visiting order for a set of user-selected tour spots and where to charge, aiming at prompting their deployment through rent-acar business models. Taking it as a multi-object optimization problem, our scheduler maximizes the total time-dependent gain obtainable by visiting a tour spot during a specific time interval, while keeping waiting time and tour length below the predefined tolerance bound. Waiting time is estimated by tracing battery remaining according to inter-destination distance and per-spot stay time. For total gain estimation, it is necessary to calculate the arrival time at each spot and retrieve the corresponding gain from the gain table filled with hot coupons and time-varying discount rates. The scheduler traverses the search space evaluating each feasible schedule and pruning unnecessary subtrees to find a profitable tour-andcharging schedule. The performance measurement result, obtained by a prototype implementation, shows that our scheduler achieves 6 times as large monetary gain as an ordinary tour scheduler just with at most 17 % extension of waiting time and tour length for the given parameter set.