Route Planning of Photovoltaic-Integrated Urban Waste Collection Vehicles

Recognized as the next generation of electric vehicles (EVs), vehicle-integrated photovoltaics (VIPVs) have the potential to promote urban sustainable development with their on-road self-energy supply ability. While the research and development of VIPVs are in the early stage, this article explores a possible VIPV application scenario—using VIPVs as garbage trucks (GTs) to facilitate environmentally friendly waste collection in urban systems. Specifically, this article proposes a route planning framework for VIPV-based GTs (VIPV-GTs), which optimizes the route of a VIPV-GT for collecting waste at multiple geographically distributed waste sites (WSs). Energy generation of the VIPV-GT is quantitatively evaluated in the proposed framework through an American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHARE) solar irradiance model. The necessary electricity charging decisions of the VIPV-GT and other operational constraints are modeled and incorporated into the route planning framework. Simulations and comparison studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.