Opportunistic Routing for the Vehicular Energy Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for constructing energy paths in vehicular energy networks, enabling efficient energy transfer using electric vehicles and wireless energy transfer technologies, with optimization solutions and heuristic algorithms.

Contribution

It develops a comprehensive approach to construct all energy paths for VEN, along with optimization models, solution methods, and heuristics, establishing foundational routing strategies for VEN.

Findings

The proposed methods effectively construct energy paths in various network scenarios.

Optimization solutions outperform heuristics in solution quality but require more computation.

The heuristic provides near-optimal solutions with reduced computation time.

Abstract

Vehicular energy network (VEN) is a vehicular network which can transport energy over a large geographical area by means of electric vehicles (EVs). In the near future, an abundance of EVs, plentiful generation of the renewables, and mature wireless energy transfer and vehicular communication technologies will expedite the realization of VEN. To transmit energy from a source to a destination, we need to establish energy paths, which are composed of segments of vehicular routes, while satisfying various design objectives. In this paper, we develop a method to construct all energy paths for a particular energy source-destination pair, followed by some analytical results of the method. We describe how to utilize the energy paths to develop optimization models for different design goals and propose two solutions. We also develop a heuristic for the power loss minimization problem. We compare the performance of the three solution methods with artificial and real-world traffic networks and provide a comprehensive comparison in terms of solution quality, computation time, solvable problem size, and applicability. This paper lays the foundations of VEN routing.