Scheduling electric vehicles with shared charging stations

Abstract

Zimbabwe has one of the highest maternal death rates in the world, partly because of the difficulty in getting expectant mothers from rural villages to health care facilities. Specifically designed electric vehicles, called African Solar Taxis, are currently being developed for a rural hospital in Zimbabwe. The vehicles will be charged at solar charging stations located at the hospital and at heath clinics. The vehicles have limited speed and range, and charging is slow compared to conventional vehicles; because of this, efficient scheduling is important. In this article we describe a method for scheduling multiple taxis that share a common charging station. References African Solar Taxis, September 2016. http://africansolartaxi.com . A. Albrecht and P. Pudney. Pick up and delivery with a solar-recharged vehicle. In 22nd National Conference of the Australian Operations Research Society (ASOR 2013), pages 239–246. Australian Society for Operations Research, Dec. 2013. http://www.asor.org.au/conferences/asor2013/J8/albrecht.pdf . K. Marriott and P. J. Stuckey. A MiniZinc tutorial. Technical report, 2015. http://www.minizinc.org/downloads/doc-latest/minizinc-tute.pdf . N. M. Moghaddam. The partially rechargeable electric vehicle routing problem with time windows and capacitated charging stations. PhD thesis, Clemson University, 2015. http://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3210&context=all_theses . H. Wang and R. Cheu. Operations of a taxi fleet for advance reservations using electric vehicles and charging stations. Trans. Res. Rec.: J. Trans. Res. Board, 2352:1–10, 2013. doi:10.3141/2352-01 . H. P. Williams. Model Building in Mathematical Programming. Wiley, 4th edition, 1999. http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118443330.html .