Optimization of Waiting Time for Electric Vehicles Using a Fuzzy Inference System

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) need to be recharged at intermediate locations, such as shopping malls, restaurants, and parking lots, to meet the daily commute requirements of their users. Currently, public electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) serve EVs by conventional methods, which can result in long waiting time for users. This issue reduces the travel efficiency of EVs and thus affects user comfort. Most previous research has studied energy consumption and charging cost optimization; however, comparatively less work has focused on waiting time optimization despite its great importance from the EV user’s perspective. In this paper, we formulate the waiting time optimization as a fuzzy integer linear programming problem and propose a novel heuristic fuzzy inference system-based algorithm (FISA) that resolves the objective function and minimizes the waiting time of EVs at public EVSE installations. We developed the underlying fuzzy inference system by defining the membership functions, expert rules, and formulation for obtaining the optimal solution. The novel FISA automates the correlations of the uncertain and independent input parameters into weighted control variables and resolves the objective function in each sampling period to optimize the waiting time for EVs with the most urgent service requirements. A java language-based simulator is developed for a parking lot to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed FISA. The simulation results indicate higher efficiency of the proposed FISA compared with state-of-art scheduling algorithms.