System Optimization for Dynamic Wireless Charging Electric Vehicles Operating in a Multiple-Route Environment

Dynamic wireless charging (DWC) technology, a novel way of supplying vehicles with electric energy, allows the vehicle battery to be recharged remotely while it is moving over power tracks, which are charging infrastructures installed beneath the road. DWC systems mitigate the range limitation of electric vehicles by using power tracks as additional sources of electric energy. This paper proposes a model and algorithm for optimally designing DWC electric vehicle (EV) systems, particularly those operating in multiple-route environments. Multi-route system comprises several single routes that share common road segments, and the vehicles operating on a specific route are equipped with identical batteries. We build a general model to optimally allocate power tracks and determine the vehicle battery size for each route. Then, we apply a particle swarm optimization algorithm to solve the given multi-route DWC-EV system optimization problem. A numerical example is solved to illustrate the characteristics of the multi-route model, and we show that the proposed modeling approach and algorithm are effective, compared with a mixed integer programming-based exact solution approach. We also conduct a sensitivity analysis to examine the solution behavior of the problem.