# Smart Charging Benefits in Autonomous Mobility on Demand Systems

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes how smart charging strategies in autonomous electric vehicle fleets can reduce costs, highlighting the impact of battery capacity and fleet size on charging efficiency and operational expenses.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel modeling approach that decouples charging and routing, providing analytical expressions for charging costs related to battery capacity and fleet operations.

## Key findings

- Larger batteries and more rebalancing vehicles lower charging costs.
- Increasing operational costs raises overall fleet charging expenses.
- Optimal strategies depend on trade-offs between battery size and fleet size.

## Abstract

In this paper, we study the potential benefits from smart charging for a fleet of electric vehicles (EVs) providing autonomous mobility-on-demand (AMoD) services. We first consider a profit-maximizing platform operator who makes decisions for routing, charging, rebalancing, and pricing for rides based on a network flow model. Clearly, each of these decisions directly influence the fleet's smart charging potential; however, it is not possible to directly characterize the effects of various system parameters on smart charging under a classical network flow model. As such, we propose a modeling variation that allows us to decouple the charging and routing problems faced by the operator. This variation allows us to provide closed-form mathematical expressions relating the charging costs to the maximum battery capacity of the vehicles as well as the fleet operational costs. We show that investing in larger battery capacities and operating more vehicles for rebalancing reduces the charging costs, while increasing the fleet operational costs. Hence, we study the trade-off the operator faces, analyze the minimum cost fleet charging strategy, and provide numerical results illustrating the smart charging benefits to the operator.