Charging scheduling with minimal waiting in a network of electric vehicles and charging stations

Environment preservation has become a prominent issue around the world. As traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles have been major contributors of air pollution, electric vehicles (EVs) are gaining popularity. However, due to the limited electricity supply of battery pack, EVs need to be charged frequently and each charge takes long time. This may degrade travel efficiency and driver comfort. To address this issue, this paper aims to minimize charging waiting time through intelligently scheduling charging activities spatially and temporally. A theoretical study has been conducted to formulate the waiting time minimized charging scheduling problem and derive a performance upper bound (i.e., the theoretical lower bound of charging waiting time). Based on the insights discovered from the theoretical analysis, a practical distributed scheme has been proposed. Extensive simulation results verify that the proposed design can achieve a waiting time near the theoretical lower bound.