Distance-Based Heuristic in Selecting a DC Charging Station for Electric Vehicles

Abstract

This paper proposes a suboptimal tour-and-charging scheduler for electric vehicles which need to select a DC charging station on their single day trips. As a variant of the traveling salesman problem, the tour scheduler finds a visiting order for a given set of destinations and one of any charging stations. To reduce the search space stemmed from a larger number of candidate stations, our distance-based heuristic finds first the nearest destination from each charging station, and calculates the distance between them. Then, m' out of the whole m candidates will be filtered according to the distance. The reduced number of candidates, namely, m', combined with constraint processing on the waiting time, significantly cuts down the execution time for tour schedule generation. The performance measurement result obtained from a prototype implementation reveals that the proposed scheme just brings at most 4.1 % increase in tour length and its accuracy is at least 0.4 with 5 picks, for the given parameter selection.