An Efficient Electric Vehicle Path-Planner That Considers the Waiting Time

In the last few years, several studies have considered different variants of the Electric Vehicle Journey Planning (EVJP) problem that consists in finding the shortest path (according to time) between two given points, passing by several charging stations and respecting the range of the vehicle. The total time taken by the vehicle is the sum of the driving time, the charging time and the waiting time. Unfortunately, the consideration of the waiting time has been neglected by previous studies. This study aims to fill this gap by introducing: (1) a graph relabeling technique using a probabilistic model of charging station occupancy generated using real EV stations data; (2) an alternative paths generation technique which accounts for worse than expected waiting time at various charging stations. Our empirical results indicate that the a priori consideration of charging station occupancy by graph relabeling can reduce the waiting time by more than 75%, while having a negligible impact on the driving time, and that the generation of alternative paths helps reduce the waiting (and total) time even more. For our public station network dataset and the current station occupancy (for now quite low), the mean total journey time (computed over 1000 requests) decreased by 17.3 minutes when our new technique was used.