Optimal Deployment and Scheduling of a Mobile Charging Station in the Internet of Electric Vehicles

As an alternative to traditional vehicles, electric vehicles (EVs) have significantly increased their market share in recent years. However, the limited battery capacity of EVs may become a bottleneck in their development. Mobile charging vehicles (MCVs), as emerging charging devices, can provide a more portable charging mode. The MCV deployment and charging strategy plays a decisive role in the effective operation of the whole Internet of Electric Vehicles (IoEV). In this paper, we investigate the joint MCV deployment and charging schedule (JMDCS) in one-to-many mode. An integer linear programming problem is formulated to minimize the completion time, consisting of the deployment time of the MCVs and the time of the charging schedule. Since this problem is NP-hard, an approximate algorithm is proposed, where a special rounding technique is employed to assign jobs to the plugs. The simulation results show that when the number of EVs is small, the proposed algorithm is close to the optimal algorithm. When the number of EVs is large, the proposed algorithm outperforms its counterparts in scheduling performance and shows superiority over the optimal algorithm in scheduling efficiency.