Optimal battery purchasing and charging strategy at electric vehicle battery swap stations

Bo Sun, Xu Sun, Danny H.K. Tsang and Ward Whitt

European Journal of Operational Research, 2019, vol. 279, issue 2, 524-539

Abstract: A battery swap station (BSS) is a facility where electric vehicle owners can quickly exchange their depleted battery for a fully-charged one. In order for battery swap to be economically sound, the BSS operator must make a long-term decision on the number of charging bays in the facility, a medium-term decision on the number of batteries in the system, and short-term decisions on when and how many batteries to recharge. In this paper, we introduce a periodic fluid model to describe charging operations at a BSS facing time-varying demand for battery swap and time-varying prices for charging empty batteries, with the objective of finding an optimal battery purchasing and charging policy that best trades off battery investment cost and operating cost including charging cost and cost of customer waiting. We consider a two-stage optimization problem: An optimal amount of battery fluid is identified in the first stage. In the second stage, an optimal charging rule is determined by solving a continuous-time optimal control problem. We characterize the optimal charging policy via Pontryagin’s maximum principle and derive an explicit upper bound for the optimal amount of battery fluid which allows us to quantify the joint effect of demand patterns and electricity prices on battery investment decisions. In particular, fewer batteries are needed when the peaks and the troughs of these periodic functions occur at different times.

Keywords: Strategic planning; Electric vehicles; Battery swapping and charging; Dynamic fluid model; Production and inventory control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221719304941
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:279:y:2019:i:2:p:524-539

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2019.06.019

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().