Towards clean transportation systems: Infrastructure planning for EVs charging while driving

Charging while driving, or wireless charging lane (WCL), has been considered a promising solution to promote the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) for clean transportation systems. However, the WCL location problem is a strategic decision that costs a significant amount of money and greatly impacts network performance due to their interactions with traffic flow patterns. The inappropriate deployment of charging infrastructure may potentially cause more congestion, leading to more pollutants emitted from internal combustion vehicles. This paper proposes a decision-making framework to assist the system planner in finding the preferred optimal WCL location based on incorporating different stakeholders' preferences, i.e. capital cost, congestion and environmental considerations. To capture the traffic evolution of different classes of vehicles (i.e. EVs and internal combustion vehicles), the travellers' optimal time-dependent route choice is modelled using the multi-class dynamic traffic assignment. The proposed framework is transformed into a single-objective problem, i.e. minimizing total system cost, and solved efficiently by a meta-heuristic based on the cross-entropy method. The framework has been intensively tested to demonstrate the capability of tracking congestion propagation and energy consumption. Finally, the trade-offs between social welfare and the capital cost of WCL infrastructure are also investigated.