Proactive Route Planning for Electric Vehicles

Saeed Nasehi, Farhana Murtaza Choudhury, Egemen Tanin

Abstract: Due to limited driving ranges, inadequate charging facilities, and time-consuming recharging, finding an optimal charging route for electric vehicles (EVs) differs from that of other vehicle types. The time and location of charging not only impact an individual EV's travel time but also the travel time of other EVs, due to potential queuing at charging station(s). We present a novel Electric Vehicle Route Planning problem for finding the fastest route with recharging. We model this as a graph problem and propose a novel two-phase algorithm to traverse the graph to find the best charging route for each EV. We also introduce the notion of 'influence factor' to propose heuristics to find the route with the minimum travel time for an EV that avoids recharging at the charging stations that can be better utilized by other EVs. Our approach reduces 50% of total travel time over the state-of-the-art.