An electric-vehicle corridor model in a dense city with applications to charging location and traffic management

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate an interesting commuting problem for an electric vehicle (EV) corridor in a dense city where en-route charging (including home- and workplace-charging) services are provided, and apply the proposed EV corridor model for charging location optimization and traffic management. Along a transport corridor in a dense city, EV commuters can choose either road paths (with/without en-route charging) or transit path to complete their home-to-workplace travel journeys. We first propose a user equilibrium model for the commuting problem in the EV corridor, by taking into account both departure time and travel path choices. Departure time equilibriums for bottleneck-constrained road paths with and without en-route charging are respectively derived. We also give a condition that ensures all EV users arrive early at the destination for the path with road and charging bottlenecks (serial bottlenecks), and discuss the existence and uniqueness of the user equilibrium solution. Based on the proposed EV corridor model, we further develop a joint optimization model of charging location and road capacity allocation, for two bottleneck-constrained road paths, to manage traffic flows. Numerical experiments are carried out to interpret the EV-corridor commute equilibrium and to validate the joint traffic management strategy in enhancing the travel efficiency of the EV corridor.