Coordinated Charging Strategy for Electric Taxis in Temporal and Spatial Scale

Currently, electric taxis have been deployed in many cities of China. However, the charging unbalance in both temporal and spatial scale has become a rising problem, which leads to low charging efficiency or charging congestion in different stations or time periods. This paper presents a multi-objective coordinated charging strategy for electric taxis in the temporal and spatial scale. That is, the objectives are maximizing the utilization efficiency of charging facilities, minimizing the load unbalance of the regional power system and minimizing the customers’ cost. Besides, the basic configuration of a charging station and operation rules of electric taxis would be the constraints. To tackle this multi-objective optimizing problems, a fuzzy mathematical method has been utilized to transfer the multi-objective optimization to a single optimization issue, and furthermore, the Improved Particle Swarm Optimization (IPSO) Algorithm has been used to solve the optimization problem. Moreover, simulation cases are carried out, Case 1 is the original charging procedure, and Cases 2 and 3 are the temporal and spatial scale optimized separately, followed with Case 4, the combined coordinated charging. The simulation shows the significant improvement in charging facilities efficiency and users’ benefits, as well as the better dispatching of electric taxis’ charging loads. OPEN ACCESS Energies 2015, 8 1257