Charge scheduling of electric vehicles in highways

Abstract

Today, charging stations (CSs) for electric vehicles (EVs) are much less popular than gas stations. Therefore, searching and selecting CSs is an important issue for the drivers of EVs. This paper investigates the EV charging problem. We propose two types of CS-selection algorithms. The first type only utilizes local information of an EV. The second type utilizes the global information obtained through interactions between the EVs and a Global CS-selection (GCS) server through the mobile telecommunications network. Our study indicates that by using the global information (specifically the workload status of each CS), the EVs can be effectively charged with short waiting times at the CSs. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.