Collaborative Routing and Charging/Discharging Scheduling of Electric Autonomous Vehicles in Coupled Power-Traffic Networks

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) traverse on the road without active human intervention. In an AV-based public transport system, AVs can be supported by an intelligent controller to provide high-efficiency transport services. The intelligent controller manages a fleet of AVs by determining their assignments to transport requests, sending instructions concerning the optimized plans, and managing the charging/discharging schedule and locations for the governed AVs. On the other hand, vehicle-to-grid is a promising technology to benefit the power system operation by using the battery storage of electric vehicles (EVs). A well-designed request assignment and travel schedule controller can substantially reduce the unnecessary travel and energy purchase cost for the transport system and power system, respectively. In this paper, we aim at coordinating the transport request assignment, traveling and charging/discharging schedule for a fleet of electric AVs (EAVs), and the reactive power support from distributed generations (DGs) to maximize utility in both the AV-based public transportation system and power distribution system. We formulate the assignment and scheduling problem as a mixed-integer program. Experiments on a modified 15-bus distribution system and a simulated traffic network are conducted. The results show that the formulated problem effectively minimizes the total travel and energy purchase cost by controlling the EAV behaviors and DG outputs. This study may promote the integration of transport and power technologies in smart grids as well as incentivize the utilization of EAVs.