DC charger selection scheme for electric vehicle-based tours visiting multiple destinations

Abstract

This paper proposes a distance-based heuristic in selecting a DC charger for a trip taking an electric vehicle, aiming at creating a tour schedule with better responsiveness. As a variant of the well-known traveling salesman problem, the tour scheduler finds a visiting order for a given set of destinations and an additional charging spot out of multiple candidates. To cope with the increasing number of candidate charging stations, our heuristic identifies the destination farthest away from the start point in network distance and then picks those chargers close to the selected destination. The reduced number of candidates, combined with a constraint-based search space traversal, significantly cuts down the execution time for tour schedule generation, not much increasing the tour length. The performance measurement result obtained from a prototype implementation reveals that the proposed scheme just brings 2.9% increase in tour length and finds a feasible schedule over 70%, even with a single candidate, for the tours most generally taken in the target city.