Algorithms for electric vehicle scheduling in large-scale mobility-on-demand schemes

We study a setting where Electric Vehicles (EVs) can be hired to drive from pick-up to drop-off points in a Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) scheme. The goal of the system is, either to maximize the number of customers that are serviced, or the total EV utilization. To do so, we characterise the optimisation problem as a max-flow problem in order to determine the set of feasible trips given the available EVs at each location. We then model and solve the EV-to-trip scheduling problem offline and optimally using Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) techniques and show that the solution scales up to medium sized problems. Given this, we develop two non-optimal algorithms, namely an incremental-MIP algorithm for medium to large problems and a greedy heuristic algorithm for very large problems. Moreover, we develop a tabu search-based local search technique to further improve upon and compare against the solution of the non-optimal algorithms. We study the performance of these algorithms in settings where either battery swap or battery charge at each station is used to cope with the EVs' limited driving range. Moreover, in settings where EVs need to be scheduled online, we propose a novel algorithm that accounts for the uncertainty in future trip requests. All algorithms are empirically evaluated using real-world data of locations of shared vehicle pick-up and drop-off stations. In our experiments, we observe that when all EVs carry the same battery which is large enough for the longest trips, the greedy algorithm with battery swap with the max-flow solution as a pre-processing step, provides the optimal solution. At the same time, the greedy algorithm with battery charge is close to the optimal (97% on average) and is further improved when local search is used. When some EVs do not have a large enough battery to execute some of the longest trips, the incremental-MIP generates solutions slightly better than the greedy, while the optimal algorithm is the best but scales up to medium sized problems only. Moreover, the online algorithm is shown to be on average at least 90% of the optimal. Finally, the greedy algorithm scales to 10-times more tasks than the incremental-MIP and 1000-times more than the static MIP in reasonable time.