Optimal Charging of Electric vehicle fleets.
In the study presented by E. Biondi, C. Boldrini, and R. Bruno, from the Institute for Informatics and Telematics, (IIT-CNR), the authors underlined that electric car sharing services have been growing in popularity in the last years but operators are striving to reduce the costs of deploying and managing their charging infrastructure. Charging technologies that offer power sharing have the potential to achieve this goal but at the cost of increasing management complexity. In order to address this problem, in their work the authors propose an efficient optimized charging methodology that minimizes recharging costs when power sharing is used and also takes into account customer satisfaction. To this aim, they formulate the recharging problem as a two-step optimization problem, considering a realistic energy pricing scheme, and they evaluate this solution using real traces of parking times in a French station-based car sharing system. They show that significant cost savings can be achieved without impacting customer satisfaction and also reducing the strain on the grid with respect to a baseline approach.

In the study the authors have considered the problem of minimising the recharging cost of the electric fleet of one-way car-sharing systems using power sharing. To cope with the problem complexity, they have formulated a two-step optimisation framework that separately assigns EVs’ energy claims to each time slot and the charging profiles for each station. They have tested the propose solution using a real-life trace of pickup and drop-off events at the stations of a large car sharing operator in Paris. The results shown demonstrate that not only their proposed strategies reduce the costs for the car sharing operator without affecting the quality of service perceived by the users, but also provide smaller peak loads and higher load factors than a simple greedy approach.
Read the full paper at: http://cnd.iit.cnr.it/chiara/pub/energycon16.pdf