Optimized path planning for electric vehicle routing and charging

We consider the decision problem of an individual EV owner who needs to pick a travel path including its charging locations and associated charge amount under time-varying traffic conditions as well as dynamic location-based electricity pricing. We show that the problem is equivalent to finding the shortest path on an extended transportation graph. In particular, we extend the original transportation graph through the use of virtual links with negative energy requirements to represent charging options available to the user. Using these extended transportation graphs, we then study the collective effects of a large number of EV owners solving the same type of path planning problem under the following control strategies: 1) a social planner decides the optimal route and charge strategy of all EVs; 2) users reach an equilibrium under locationally-variant electricity prices that are constant over time; 3) the transportation and power systems are separately controlled through marginal pricing strategies, not taking into account their mutual effect on one another. We numerically show that this disjoint type of control can lead to instabilities in the grid as well as inefficient system operation.