Least costly energy management for Electric Vehicles with plug-in Range Extenders

Electric Vehicles (EVs), though appealing for an increasing number of users, suffer from known limitations of battery energy storage. We analyze a rentable plug-in Range Extender (RE) concept as a viable way to increase the EV range only when really needed, avoiding its encumbrance in normal urban usage. This concept leads to the formulation of an original energy management problem: in addition to usual operating constraints, the rental decision must be taken in the least costly way from the user´s perspective. The original problem is solved offline by Dynamic Programming to provide the best achievable performance; a mixed integer convex reformulation is shown to yield the same results in much less time. The performance is compared by means of a thorough simulation study.