Section: New Results

Global optimization for online resource allocation

Participant : Jean-Marc Lasgouttes.

As part of the Mobility 2.0 FP7 project, we have considered the possibility to allocate charging stations to Full Electric Vehicle (FEV) users in a way that, instead of merely minimizing their travel time, tries to improve the travel time for the whole community.

Our setting can be seen as a resource allocation problem, known as the Transportation Problem in Operations Research literature. It is solvable using several algorithms, among which the simplex algorithm or the Hungarian algorithm. Unfortunately, these algorithms are not well-adapted here for two reasons:

• The allocation of slots to users is done on-line, when the user does a request. It is not possible to wait until all the users are known before doing the allocation;

• The complexity of these algorithms is very high, especially since, due to the effect of range limitations, each request has different characteristics, which is equivalent to increasing the types of customers.

We therefore present a simple heuristic approach, which is fast enough for systems with thousands of stations. Its principle is to penalize the cost for the user with an approximation of the extra cost incurred to future users who compete for the same resource (a charging or parking slot).

This work has been presented at the ITSC'2015 conference [33] .