The increasing concern over global warming has led to the rapid development of the electric vehicle industry. Electric vehicles (EVs) have the potential to reduce the greenhouse effect and facilitate more efficient use of energy resources. In this paper, we study several EV route planning problems that take into consideration possible battery charging or swapping operations. Given a road network, the objective is to determine the shortest (travel time) route that a vehicle with a given battery capacity can take to travel between a pair of vertices or to visit a set of vertices with several stops, if necessary, at battery switch stations. We present polynomial time algorithms for the EV shortest travel time path problem and the fixed tour EV touring problem, where the fixed tour problem requires visiting a set of vertices in a given order. Based on the result, we also propose constant factor approximation algorithms for the EV touring problem, which is a generalization of the traveling salesman problem. origin in a given order. This result extends the previous studies of the fixed path gas station problem reported in [18,22,23] by using graph-theoretic techniques.3. We propose two approximation algorithms within a 9 4 -factor and a 9 2 -factor, respectively, for the uniform and non-uniform cost on-site station EV touring problem. Moreover, if the battery capacity is sufficiently large, the approximation ratio is the same as that of the well-known Christofides algorithm for the TSP, i.e., 3 2 . 4. We also study the off-site station EV touring problem and propose a 3 2 ( 3+2α 1−2α )-approximation algorithm to solve the problem, where α is a given acceptable distance between a city and its nearest battery switch station.
PreliminariesA great deal of research has been devoted to the shortest route planning problem; and many variations and extensions of the problem have been proposed. One related problem is the well-known capacitated vehicle routing problem, which involves finding a set of routes that begin at a depot, visit multiple customers and deliver goods, and return to the depot such that the number of vehicles, each of which has a limited carrying capacity, is minimized or the total distance is minimized. Readers may refer to Laporte's survey [20] and Pillac et al.'s review [25] for further details on the constraints and conditions. Another related work is the orienteering problem where the objective is to find a path of a fixed length from a single source that visits as many locations as possible [4,5,7]. The EV touring problem can be regarded as an extension of this problem because the goal is to visit as many cities as possible under a fixed (i.e., full) battery capacity.Compared with the widely studied routing problems, there is a dearth of research on the optimal refueling problem [18,22,23,30,31], where the objective is to minimize the total cost of the fuel used. Lin et al. [22,23] investigated the shortest path problem with optimal refueling policies. They proposed a linear time algorithm for the fix...