1 research outputs found
Smart Charging Benefits in Autonomous Mobility on Demand Systems
In this paper, we study the potential benefits from smart charging for a
fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) providing autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD)
services. We first consider a profit-maximizing platform operator who makes
decisions for routing, charging, rebalancing, and pricing for rides based on a
network flow model. Clearly, each of these decisions directly influence the
fleet's smart charging potential; however, it is not possible to directly
characterize the effects of various system parameters on smart charging under a
classical network flow model. As such, we propose a modeling variation that
allows us to decouple the charging and routing problems faced by the operator.
This variation allows us to provide closed-form mathematical expressions
relating the charging costs to the maximum battery capacity of the vehicles as
well as the fleet operational costs. We show that investing in larger battery
capacities and operating more vehicles for rebalancing reduces the charging
costs, while increasing the fleet operational costs. Hence, we study the
trade-off the operator faces, analyze the minimum cost fleet charging strategy,
and provide numerical results illustrating the smart charging benefits to the
operator.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, ITSC 201