Formula omitted]: A multi-objective route planning and charging slot reservation approach for electric vehicles considering state of traffic and charging station

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) are environment friendly and are expected to find tremendous growth in the near future. However, the short voyaging reach and the lack of charging lattice have impeded the large-scale application of EVs. A choice of a particular route for EV is largely dependent on the availability of charging stations on that route as well as the ease of charging facility offered by the charging station (including state of the charging station, user convenience, etc.). Hence, it is vital to delve into the challenge of locating a charging station that offers the utmost user convenience in charging EVs. This paper attempts to present a solution to this very problem. The proposed approach is an improvised distributed system, namely, S2RC (Smart Search of Route and Charging) which plans an energy efficient EV route considering EV’s state-of-charge (SoC) level, traffic conditions, the frequency of charging stations and the state of charging station (the charging resources of the charging station along with their occupancy levels, etc.). This distributed architecture employs the proposed agile charging slot reservation approach for the EVs that wish to get recharged at a particular charging station. Besides, to delineate the interactive mechanism of EVs recharging, three non-identical objective functions are formulated to minimize the overall energy consumption of EVs, waiting time at charging station, and total charging expenditure. After performing the extensive simulations on the weighted directed real transportation graph of Chandigarh, India, the proposed S2RC system recommends a charging station in accordance to the preferences given by the EV user. Case studies verify the significance and validity of the proposed model in terms of energy efficiency and user convenience.