Parking Slot Assignment for Overnight Electric Vehicle Charging Based on Network Flow Modeling

This paper designs a parking slot assignment scheme for electric vehicles (EVs) to support efficient overnight charging. Built upon a sophisticated computer algorithm, namely, network flow modeling, it takes EVs and parking areas as flow nodes. For an EV node, the link capacity to those parking place nodes within the walking distance limitation is set to 1. In addition, for a parking place node, the link capacity to the sink node is set to the number of parking slots facilitating EV charging. Moreover, the walking distance constraint is adjusted by the binary search mechanism to further reduce the worst-case distance from the parking place to the driver's home or lodge, taking advantage of affordable time complexity. The performance measurement result, obtained from a prototype implementation on the real-life parking area distribution, shows that the proposed scheme can satisfy 67.7% of parking requests for 10,000 EVs and average walking distance is around 70% of the maximum distance constraint.