A static relocation strategy for electric car-sharing systems in a vehicle-to-grid framework

ABSTRACT

Car-Sharing Systems (CSSs) are becoming increasingly popular in urban areas replacing car ownership. The most attractive CSSs give users the opportunity to make one-way trips. This behavior creates an unbalanced status between stations. Hence, some users could leave the system because they may not find a car/parking place available near their origin/destination. In recent years, CSSs are employing Electric Vehicles (EVs). A recent technology applied to EVs, called Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), has allowed selling energy, transferring it from vehicle batteries to an electric grid. In this paper, we adopt Electric Cars (ECs) with V2G for one-way station-based CSSs. We suggest ECs distribution among stations at the beginning of each day, simultaneously making the most of V2G technology and satisfying CSSs customers’ requests. These distributions represent the final configurations that should be obtained through overnight vehicle relocation. The proposed models have been applied to a real-sized case achieving promising results.

KEYWORDS:

• Car-sharing
• static relocation
• vehicle-to-grid (V2G)
• shared energy
• smart grids
• electric vehicles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.