Optimal configuration of dynamic wireless charging facilities considering electric vehicle battery capacity

Dynamic wireless charging facilities deployed on the road network offer an effective charging method to alleviate the electric vehicle users’ range anxiety and thus facilitate the promotion of electric vehicles. The main benefit of wireless charging is that it extends EV’s driving range by enabling EV en-route recharging, which consequently reduces the required battery size for EVs. Basically, given densely distributed wireless charging lanes on the road network, smaller and less expensive batteries would be able to meet the travel demand. From the societal point of view, the reduction of battery size/capacity is capable of justifying more construction of wireless charging lanes. While previous research works on optimal deployment of wireless charging facilities ignored this benefit, this study aims to explicitly consider the tradeoff between the costs of building recharging infrastructure and manufacturing batteries from the societal point of view in the optimal configuration of dynamic wireless charging facilities. The problem is formulated into a bi-level programming model, wherein the upper-level model seeks to minimize the total social cost, and the lower-level model captures EV drivers’ choices in terms of battery size, travel route, and driving and charging behavior. To handle the problem, we first relax the path cost constraint and apply the linearization techniques to reformulate the problem into a mixed-integer linear programming, from which a lower bound of the problem can be obtained. An efficient surrogate optimization algorithm is then developed to solve the problem.