Charging Infrastructure Allocation for Wireless Charging Transportation System

The dynamic wireless charging electric vehicle (DWC-EV) is the most developed form of EVs which use wireless power transfer (WPT) technology. The vehicle can be charged using a wireless charger embedded under the road, and an extremely competitive advantage of DWC-EV is that it can be charged while on the move. Thus, this system allows EVs to overcome the range limitation, long charging time, and heavy battery weights. In DWC-EV system, the battery and charging infrastructures called power tracks are major elements to operate vehicles, and these factors occupy large portion of initial investment cost for establishing the system. This paper suggests a mathematical model to optimally find the battery capacity and the allocation of power tracks in a multiple-route public transportation system. In addition, genetic algorithm (GA), which is one of widely used metaheuristics, is proposed as a solution approach to solve large and complex problems. Since chromosome design determines the format and information of chromosomes, it is crucial to the quality of the solutions and the performance of GA. We suggest two chromosome design methods and the methods to deal with infeasible chromosomes. A number of numerical experiments for comparing solutions and computation time are conducted, and we use the optimal solutions suggested by CPLEX solver as criteria. We also show that the proposed GA design method can be useful and effective compared to the exact solution approach based on the mixed integer programming (MIP).