Scheduling Mobile Charging Stations for Electric Vehicle Charging

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are being increasingly seen as an eco-friendly alternative to conventional internal combustion vehicles. EVs require periodic charging of their batteries and fixed charging stations (FCSs) have been used commonly to charge EV batteries. However, FCSs may not be able to charge many EVs during increased demands. Mobile charging stations (MCS) have been proposed for charging EVs at different spots, with an MCS carrying batteries travelling to the EV to charge its batteries. In this paper, we propose a framework for temporarily increasing the capacity of FCSs by scheduling MCSs to service additional EVs during increased demand. The problem of scheduling the MCSs to different FCSs based on EV charging demands is formulated, and is shown to be NP-hard. Two offline heuristic algorithms to solve the problem are proposed. Detailed simulation on a real-world map is presented to show that the algorithms perform well in realistic scenarios.