A Page-Rank-like Approach to Optimal Placement of Charging Stations in a Warehouse

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel Page-Rank-inspired method for optimally placing charging stations in warehouses, considering factors like distance and battery charge levels to improve efficiency for electric industrial trucks.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible graph-based approach that extends traditional distance criteria to include battery state of charge for better station placement.

Findings

Effective in optimizing charging station locations

Incorporates battery SOC into placement decisions

Flexible extension of existing models

Abstract

In this paper we describe an approach to the problem of finding optimal positions for charging stations (CS) in a warehouse, where a fleet of electrical industrial trucks/forklifts is employed. Our procedure is motivated by Googles Page-Ranking. The graph model underlying our method is easily extensible from simple distance based criteria, relevant for choosing optimal CS-positions, to more complex criteria taking into account, e.g., the ''state of charge'' (SOC) of the individual trucks battery.