Online-to-offline mobile charging system for electric vehicles: Strategic planning and online operation

Limitations such as the driving range, a lack of charging facilities, and the inconvenience of charging services hamper the further market development of EVs. With the development of mobile Internet, an alternative charging option for EVs, i.e., online-to-offline (O2O) mobile charging services, can be established to increase the charging convenience for EV users. This study aims to investigate the strategic planning and online operation of such mobile charging service systems. At the operational level, we model the MC dispatching as a dynamic vehicle routing problem and adopt a scenario-sampling-based online policy to operate the MCs in real time. At the planning level, we construct a simulation-based optimization framework to design the number and locations of depots, MC fleet size, and battery size. Numerical tests are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed planning and operation methodologies, from which some planning and managerial policy insights are derived.