Abstract:

Fueled by the rapid development in green and intelligent transportation systems, various incentives from government or industries worldwide are promoting electric vehicles (EVs) to act as key enabler for the evolution of sustainable transport technology. The proliferation of EVs has posed significant challenges to the existing power grid infrastructure. It thus becomes of vital importance to efficiently manage the Electro-Mobility for large demand from EVs. Due to limited cruising range of EVs, vehicles have to make frequent stops for recharging, while long charging period is one major concern under plug-in charging. The authors herein leverage battery swapping (BS) technology to provide an alternative charging service, which substantially reduces the charging duration (from hours down to minutes). Concerning in practice that various battery is generally not compatible with each other, the authors introduce battery heterogeneity into the swapping service, concerning the case that different types of EVs co-exist. A battery heterogeneity-based swapping service framework is then proposed. Further with reservations for swapping service enabled, the demand load can be anticipated at BS stations as a guidance to alleviate service congestion. Therefore, potential hotspots can be avoided. Results show the performance gains under the proposed scheme by comparing to other benchmarks, in terms of service waiting time, etc. In particular, the diversity of battery stock across the network can be effectively maintained for achieving an optimal E-Mobility system.