Optimal Charging and Routing of Electric Vehicles

At international level different new policies have been developed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere. The result is an increase of green technologies for energy production and transportation. Electric vehicles (EVs) need to be charged in the fastest time possible and smart grids should afford such a request. Moreover, new technologies of charging stations and EVs give now the possibility to perform Smart Charging (i.e., the modulation over time of EVs’ charging) and Vehicle to Grid policies. In the present paper, attention is focused on users’ perspective, on the basis of an available infrastructure of charging stations of known location, type, and electrical constraints. In particular, the problem is the one of optimal routing and charging of EVs to satisfy a freight transportation service, and it corresponds to a modification of the well known vehicle routing problem (VRP). Though the interest on EVs has grown in the last decade, scientific articles are mainly focused on smart grids and on the mitigation of a distributed demand of energy (Yagcitekin et al. (2016), Ferro et al. (2019)). Few articles regarding the routing of EVs are present, and they are starting to appear in the recent literature (Hiermann et al. (2016)). This is the reason why formalizations differ from each other, several variants have been considered, and authors focused on specific objectives and do not consider other ones. In the present contribution, the following new features are considered: the characteristics of the charging stations have been detailed considering different power levels for the recharging process; models for the electrical consumes take into account the territory characteristics (slope of roads), the variable vehicle mass, different speeds, and the electric drive efficiency; time windows, classical VRP constraints, partial recharges, and time-variant energy prices have been included.