Optimal Routing with In-Route Charging of Mobility-on-Demand Electric Vehicles

Mobility-On-Demand (MoD) systems using electric vehicles (EVs) are expected to play a significantly increasing role in near future urban transportation systems, to cope with the massive increases in urban population and reduce carbon emissions. One inconvenience in MoD- EV systems is the need of some customers to perform in-routing charging. In this paper, we propose a routing scheme that aims to reduce the inconvenience of in-route charging in MoD-EV systems. By modeling the routing problem between multiple MoD-EV stations with in-route charging as a multi-server queuing system, we formulate our objective as a stochastic convex optimization problem that minimizes the average overall trip time for all customers relative to their actual trip time without in-route charging. Optimal routing decisions that achieve this goal are then derived analytically. Simulation results show the significant merits of our proposed solution as compared to shortest and random routing decisions.