Routing Optimization of Electric Vehicles for Charging With Event-Driven Pricing Strategy

With the increasing market penetration of electric vehicles (EVs), the charging behavior and driving characteristics of EVs have an increasing impact on the operation of power grids and traffic networks. Existing research on EV routing planning and charging navigation strategies mainly focuses on vehicle-road-network interactions, but the vehicle-to-vehicle interaction has rarely been considered, particularly in studying simultaneous charging requests. To investigate the interaction of multiple vehicles in routing planning and charging, a routing optimization of EVs for charging with an event-driven pricing strategy is proposed. The urban area of a city is taken as a case for numerical simulation, which demonstrates that the proposed strategy can not only alleviate the long-time queuing for EV fast charging but also improve the utilization rate of charging infrastructures.
Note to Practitioners
—This article was inspired by the concerns of difficulties for electric vehicle (EV)’s fast charging and the imbalance of the utilization rate of charging facilities. Existing route optimization and charging navigation research are mainly applicable to static traffic networks, which cannot dynamically adjust driving routes and charging strategies with real-time traffic information. Besides, the mutual impact between vehicles is rarely considered in these works in routing planning. To resolve the shortcomings of existing models, a receding-horizon-based strategy that can be applied to dynamic traffic networks is proposed. In this article, various factors that the user is concerned about within the course of driving are converted into driving costs, through which each road section of traffic networks is assigned the corresponding values. Combined with the graph theory analysis method, the mathematical form of the dynamic traffic network is presented. Then, the article carefully plans and adjusts EV driving routes and charging strategies. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly increase the adoption of EV fast charging while alleviating unreasonable distributions of regional charging demand.