Frontiers In Operations Research For Overcoming Barriers To Vehicle Electrification

FRONTIERS IN OPERATIONS RESEARCH FOR OVERCOMINGBARRIERS TO VEHICLE ELECTRIFICATIONbyMAHYAR MOVAHED NEJADAugust 2015 Advisor: Dr. Ratna Babu ChinnamMajor: Industrial EngineeringDegree: Doctor of Philosophy Electric vehicles (EVs) hold many promises including diversification of the transporta-tion energy feedstock and reduction of greenhouse gas and other emissions. However,achieving large-scale adoption of EVs presents a number of challenges resulting from a cur-rent lack of supporting infrastructure and difficulties in overcoming technological barriers.This dissertation addresses some of these challenges by contributing to the advancement oftheories in the areas of network optimization and mechanism design.To increase the electric driving range of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), wepropose a power-train energy management control system that exploits energy efficiency dif-ferences of the electric machine and the internal combustion engine during route planning.We introduce the Energy-Efficient Routing problem (EERP) for PHEVs, and formulatethis problem as a new class of the shortest path problem. We prove that the EERP is NP-complete. We then propose two exact algorithms that find optimal solutions by exploitingthe transitive structure inherent in the network. To tackle the intractability of the problem,we proposed a Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (FPTAS). From a theoreticperspective, the proposed two-phase approaches improve the state-of-the-art to optimallysolving shortest path problems on general constrained multi-graph networks. These novelapproaches are scalable and offer broad potential in many network optimization problems.In the context of vehicle routing, this is the first study to take into account energy efficiency