Route and charging planning for electric vehicles: a multi-objective approach

Electric vehicle (EV) travel planning is a complex task that involves optimizing both the routes and the charging sessions for EVs. Existing algorithms rely on single-objective optimization, which limits their ability to consider EV users’ multiple, often conflicting objectives. In this paper, we introduce a new, genuinely multi-objective approach to EV travel planning, which can find Pareto sets containing multiple EV travel plans optimized simultaneously for multiple objectives. We focus on the bi-objective optimization for travel time and cost. To our knowledge, our algorithm is the first to perform such a genuine multi-objective optimization on realistically large country-scale problem instances involving 12,000 charging stations. We implemented our approach into a fully operational prototype application and extensively evaluated it on real-world data. Our results show that our approach can achieve practically usable planning times with only a minor loss of solution quality despite the very high computational complexity of the problem.