Coordinated Electric Vehicle Re-Charging to Reduce Impact on Daily Driving Schedule

With improvements to ranges and a growing charging infrastructure, electric vehicles are becoming increasingly popular. However, many prospective owners can not charge their vehicle at home. They thus would have to use public charging infrastructure, which reduces the appeal of electric vehicles to them due to the extra effort and time spent during charging. Many previous works tried to enhance this situation by using intelligent charging station scheduling and/or route planning to reduce the time overhead. But most solutions are focused on long distance travel or single trips without considering the often regular schedule of drivers in urban areas. We propose a charge stop planner that takes into account the activities of a driver's daily schedule to minimize the additional time the driver has to spend charging the vehicle. The charging stops can either be en-route charging at fast charging stations between two activities or destination charging at slow charging stations. To reduce waiting times, we coordinate the charging station visits between the vehicles with a centralized service. In an extensive set of simulation experiments, we demonstrate that our approach reduces the additional time for charging by about 40 %, compared to only destination charging and only en-route charging. The charging station coordination further reduces the waiting time by about 50 %.