Autonomous Vehicle Logistic System: Joint Routing and Charging Strategy

Abstract

The smart city embraces gradual adoption of autonomous vehicles (AVs) into the intelligent transportation system. Contributed by their full-fledged controllability, AVs can respond to instantaneous situations with high efficiency and flexibility. In this paper, we propose a novel AV logistic system (AVLS) to accommodate logistic demands for smart cities. We focus on determining the optimal routes for the governed AVs in consideration of various requirements imposed by the vehicles, logistic requests, renewable generations, and the underlying transportation system. By coordinating their routes and charging schedules, the system can effectively utilize the renewable energy generated by distributed generations. We formulate the joint routing and charging problem in the form of quadratic-constrained mixed integer linear program. To improve its scalability, we develop a distributed solution method via dual decomposition. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of proposed system and solution methods. The results show that AVLS can effectively utilize excessive renewable energy while accomplishing all logistic requests. The distributed solution can develop near-optimal solutions with compelling improvement in computational speed.