Dynamic capacitated facility location problem in mobile renewable energy charging stations under sustainability consideration

Abstract

The deployment of mobile renewable energy charging stations plays a crucial role in facilitating the overall adoption of electric vehicles and reducing reliance on fossil fuels. This study addresses the dynamic capacitated facility location problem in mobile charging stations from a sustainability perspective. This paper proposes Two-stage stochastic programming with recourse that performs well for this application, and the location of the mobile renewable energy charging station (MRECS) management addresses the complex dynamics of reusable items. To solve this problem, we suggested dealing with differential evolutionary (DE) and DE Q-learning (DEQL) algorithms, as two novel optimization and reinforcement learning approaches, are presented as solution approaches to validate their performance. Evaluation of the outcomes reveals a considerable disparity between the algorithms, and DEQL performs better in solving the presented problem. In addition, DEQL could minimize the total operation cost and carbon emission by 7% and 20%, respectively. In contrast, the DE could decrease carbon emissions and total operation costs by 5% and 2.5%, respectively.